BFI FILM CLASSICS BOOK CLUB
Join our new book club featuring the BFI Film Classics series! The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film's 'classic' status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author's personal response to the film.
On the second Monday of every month, our Marketing Coordinator, Lewis Parry, will lead an in-person meeting centered around a selection from the BFI Film Classics series. Join us to share your opinions on the film, the author's interpretations, and develop a better understanding of some of your new favorite films! Everyone is welcome!
All the President's Men (BFI Film Classics)
By
Robert B. Ray, Christian Keathley
Event: Monday, November 13, 2023 6PM
Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.
Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement.
They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
About the Author
Christian Keathley is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA. He is author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2005) and co-author of The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound & Image (2016). His writing has been published in journals such as Screen and MOVIE. Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (1985), The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008), Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau (2012) and The Structure of Complex Images (2020).
Event: Monday, November 13, 2023 6PM
Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.
Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement.
They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
About the Author
Christian Keathley is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA. He is author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2005) and co-author of The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound & Image (2016). His writing has been published in journals such as Screen and MOVIE. Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (1985), The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008), Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau (2012) and The Structure of Complex Images (2020).
Event: Monday, November 13, 2023 6PM
Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.
Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement.They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
About the Author
Christian Keathley is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA. He is author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2005) and co-author of The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound & Image (2016). His writing has been published in journals such as Screen and MOVIE. Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (1985), The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008), Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau (2012) and The Structure of Complex Images (2020).
It's a Wonderful Life (BFI Film Classics)
By
Michael Newton
Event: Monday, December 11, 2023 6PM
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.
Michael Newton's study of the film investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.
About the Author
Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series.
Event: Monday, December 11, 2023 6PM
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.
Michael Newton's study of the film investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.
About the Author
Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series.
Event: Monday, December 11, 2023 6PM
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.
Michael Newton's study of the film investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.
About the Author
Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series.
The Thing (BFI Film Classics)
By
Anne Billson
Event: Monday, October 9, 2023 6PM
An extra-terrestrial alien, capable of replicating any living form it touches, infiltrates an isolated research base in the Antarctic, and sows suspicion and terror among the men trapped there. Which of them is still human, and which a perfect alien facsimile? John Carpenter's The Thing, the second adaptation of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release in 1982, but has since been acknowledged as a classic fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. Now a regular fixture in lists of the greatest movies of all time, it is acclaimed for its inspired and still shocking practical special effects, its deftly sketched characters brought to life by a superb cast, elegant widescreen cinematography, ominous score, and a uniquely tense narrative packed with appropriately ever-changing metaphors about the human condition.
Anne Billson's elegant and trenchant study, first published in 1997, was one of the first publications to give the film its due as a modern classic, hailing it as a landmark movie that brilliantly redefined horror and science fiction conventions, and combined them with sly humour, Lewis Carroll logic and disturbingly prescient metaphors for many of the sociopolitical, scientific and medical upheavals of the past three decades.In her foreword to this new edition, Anne Billson reflects upon The Thing's changing fortunes in the years since its release, its influence on film-makers including Tarantino and del Toro, and its topicality in an era of melting ice caps and with humanity besieged by a deadly organism.
About the Author
Anne Billson is a film critic, photographer, screenwriter, and the author of horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex and The Coming Thing, as well as several works of non-fiction including Billson Film Database and Cats on Film. She lives in Antwerp, Belgium
Event: Monday, October 9, 2023 6PM
An extra-terrestrial alien, capable of replicating any living form it touches, infiltrates an isolated research base in the Antarctic, and sows suspicion and terror among the men trapped there. Which of them is still human, and which a perfect alien facsimile? John Carpenter's The Thing, the second adaptation of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release in 1982, but has since been acknowledged as a classic fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. Now a regular fixture in lists of the greatest movies of all time, it is acclaimed for its inspired and still shocking practical special effects, its deftly sketched characters brought to life by a superb cast, elegant widescreen cinematography, ominous score, and a uniquely tense narrative packed with appropriately ever-changing metaphors about the human condition.
Anne Billson's elegant and trenchant study, first published in 1997, was one of the first publications to give the film its due as a modern classic, hailing it as a landmark movie that brilliantly redefined horror and science fiction conventions, and combined them with sly humour, Lewis Carroll logic and disturbingly prescient metaphors for many of the sociopolitical, scientific and medical upheavals of the past three decades.In her foreword to this new edition, Anne Billson reflects upon The Thing's changing fortunes in the years since its release, its influence on film-makers including Tarantino and del Toro, and its topicality in an era of melting ice caps and with humanity besieged by a deadly organism.
About the Author
Anne Billson is a film critic, photographer, screenwriter, and the author of horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex and The Coming Thing, as well as several works of non-fiction including Billson Film Database and Cats on Film. She lives in Antwerp, Belgium
Event: Monday, October 9, 2023 6PM
An extra-terrestrial alien, capable of replicating any living form it touches, infiltrates an isolated research base in the Antarctic, and sows suspicion and terror among the men trapped there. Which of them is still human, and which a perfect alien facsimile? John Carpenter's The Thing, the second adaptation of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release in 1982, but has since been acknowledged as a classic fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. Now a regular fixture in lists of the greatest movies of all time, it is acclaimed for its inspired and still shocking practical special effects, its deftly sketched characters brought to life by a superb cast, elegant widescreen cinematography, ominous score, and a uniquely tense narrative packed with appropriately ever-changing metaphors about the human condition.
Anne Billson's elegant and trenchant study, first published in 1997, was one of the first publications to give the film its due as a modern classic, hailing it as a landmark movie that brilliantly redefined horror and science fiction conventions, and combined them with sly humour, Lewis Carroll logic and disturbingly prescient metaphors for many of the sociopolitical, scientific and medical upheavals of the past three decades.In her foreword to this new edition, Anne Billson reflects upon The Thing's changing fortunes in the years since its release, its influence on film-makers including Tarantino and del Toro, and its topicality in an era of melting ice caps and with humanity besieged by a deadly organism.
About the Author
Anne Billson is a film critic, photographer, screenwriter, and the author of horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex and The Coming Thing, as well as several works of non-fiction including Billson Film Database and Cats on Film. She lives in Antwerp, Belgium
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (BFI Film Classics)
By
Catherine Fowler
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, September 11, 2023 6PM
Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman portrays in excruciating detail and in real time the daily life of a single mother, as she cooks, cleans and cares for her son, and has sex with male clients in her home. Akerman, who shot the film in five weeks with an all-female crew, described Jeanne Dielman as a challenge to 'a hierarchy of images' that places a car accident or a kiss 'higher in the hierarchy than washing up ... And it's not by accident, but relates to the place of woman in the social hierarchy ... Woman's work comes out of oppression and whatever comes out of oppression is more interesting.'
Yet Jeanne Dielman's importance is broader and more sustained than the originality of its subject matter and form. More than any other film before or since, it reminds the viewer that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for its protagonist as much as for ourselves.About the Author
Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been a student of Chantal Akerman's cinema for some twenty five years, having written her PhD on Akerman's 'cinema of displacements' and has published an article on Jeanne Dielman in the edited volume 24 Frames: The Cinema of the Low Countries (ed. Mathijs, 2004).
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, September 11, 2023 6PM
Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman portrays in excruciating detail and in real time the daily life of a single mother, as she cooks, cleans and cares for her son, and has sex with male clients in her home. Akerman, who shot the film in five weeks with an all-female crew, described Jeanne Dielman as a challenge to 'a hierarchy of images' that places a car accident or a kiss 'higher in the hierarchy than washing up ... And it's not by accident, but relates to the place of woman in the social hierarchy ... Woman's work comes out of oppression and whatever comes out of oppression is more interesting.'
Yet Jeanne Dielman's importance is broader and more sustained than the originality of its subject matter and form. More than any other film before or since, it reminds the viewer that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for its protagonist as much as for ourselves.About the Author
Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been a student of Chantal Akerman's cinema for some twenty five years, having written her PhD on Akerman's 'cinema of displacements' and has published an article on Jeanne Dielman in the edited volume 24 Frames: The Cinema of the Low Countries (ed. Mathijs, 2004).
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, September 11, 2023 6PM
Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman portrays in excruciating detail and in real time the daily life of a single mother, as she cooks, cleans and cares for her son, and has sex with male clients in her home. Akerman, who shot the film in five weeks with an all-female crew, described Jeanne Dielman as a challenge to 'a hierarchy of images' that places a car accident or a kiss 'higher in the hierarchy than washing up ... And it's not by accident, but relates to the place of woman in the social hierarchy ... Woman's work comes out of oppression and whatever comes out of oppression is more interesting.'
Yet Jeanne Dielman's importance is broader and more sustained than the originality of its subject matter and form. More than any other film before or since, it reminds the viewer that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for its protagonist as much as for ourselves.
About the Author
Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been a student of Chantal Akerman's cinema for some twenty five years, having written her PhD on Akerman's 'cinema of displacements' and has published an article on Jeanne Dielman in the edited volume 24 Frames: The Cinema of the Low Countries (ed. Mathijs, 2004).
Picnic at Hanging Rock (BFI Film Classics)
By
Anna Backman Rogers
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, August 14, 2023 6PM
Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking.
Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.About the Author
Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis-Image (2015), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (2020). She is also the co-editor of three books on feminism and visual culture with Laura Mulvey and Boel Ulfsdotter. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, August 14, 2023 6PM
Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking.
Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.About the Author
Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis-Image (2015), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (2020). She is also the co-editor of three books on feminism and visual culture with Laura Mulvey and Boel Ulfsdotter. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, August 14, 2023 6PM
Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking.
Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.About the Author
Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis-Image (2015), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (2020). She is also the co-editor of three books on feminism and visual culture with Laura Mulvey and Boel Ulfsdotter. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture.
Eraserhead (BFI Film Classics)
By
Claire Henry
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, July 10, 2023 6PM
A surreal and darkly humorous vision, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s.
Claire Henry's study of the film takes us into its netherworld, providing a detailed account of its production history, its exhibition and reception, and its elusive meanings. Using original archival research, she traces how Lynch took his nightmare of Philadelphia to the City of Dreams, infusing his LA-shot film with the industrial cityscapes and sounds of the Callowhill district. Henry then engages with Eraserhead's irresistible inscrutability and advances a fresh interpretation, reframing auteurism to centre Lynch's creative processes as a visual artist and Transcendental Meditation practitioner. Finally, she outlines how Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things' became a model midnight movie and later grew in reputation and influence across broader film culture.
From the opening chapter on Eraserhead's famous 'baby' to the final chapter on the film's tentacular influence, Henry's compelling and authoritative account offers illuminating new perspectives on the making and meaning of the film and its legacy. Through an in-depth analysis of the film's rich mise en sc ne, cinematography, sound and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms the film's significance as Lynch's first feature, but also advances a wider case for appreciating its status as a film classic.
About the Author
Claire Henry is a Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Screen at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (2014), co-author of Screening the Posthuman (2023), and a contributor to edited volumes on national cinemas, genre and censorship. She has also published widely in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Open Cultural Studies, Frames Cinema Journal and Senses of Cinema.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, July 10, 2023 6PM
A surreal and darkly humorous vision, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s.
Claire Henry's study of the film takes us into its netherworld, providing a detailed account of its production history, its exhibition and reception, and its elusive meanings. Using original archival research, she traces how Lynch took his nightmare of Philadelphia to the City of Dreams, infusing his LA-shot film with the industrial cityscapes and sounds of the Callowhill district. Henry then engages with Eraserhead's irresistible inscrutability and advances a fresh interpretation, reframing auteurism to centre Lynch's creative processes as a visual artist and Transcendental Meditation practitioner. Finally, she outlines how Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things' became a model midnight movie and later grew in reputation and influence across broader film culture.
From the opening chapter on Eraserhead's famous 'baby' to the final chapter on the film's tentacular influence, Henry's compelling and authoritative account offers illuminating new perspectives on the making and meaning of the film and its legacy. Through an in-depth analysis of the film's rich mise en sc ne, cinematography, sound and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms the film's significance as Lynch's first feature, but also advances a wider case for appreciating its status as a film classic.
About the Author
Claire Henry is a Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Screen at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (2014), co-author of Screening the Posthuman (2023), and a contributor to edited volumes on national cinemas, genre and censorship. She has also published widely in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Open Cultural Studies, Frames Cinema Journal and Senses of Cinema.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, July 10, 2023 6PM
A surreal and darkly humorous vision, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s.
Claire Henry's study of the film takes us into its netherworld, providing a detailed account of its production history, its exhibition and reception, and its elusive meanings. Using original archival research, she traces how Lynch took his nightmare of Philadelphia to the City of Dreams, infusing his LA-shot film with the industrial cityscapes and sounds of the Callowhill district. Henry then engages with Eraserhead's irresistible inscrutability and advances a fresh interpretation, reframing auteurism to centre Lynch's creative processes as a visual artist and Transcendental Meditation practitioner. Finally, she outlines how Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things' became a model midnight movie and later grew in reputation and influence across broader film culture.
From the opening chapter on Eraserhead's famous 'baby' to the final chapter on the film's tentacular influence, Henry's compelling and authoritative account offers illuminating new perspectives on the making and meaning of the film and its legacy. Through an in-depth analysis of the film's rich mise en sc ne, cinematography, sound and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms the film's significance as Lynch's first feature, but also advances a wider case for appreciating its status as a film classic.
About the Author
Claire Henry is a Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Screen at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (2014), co-author of Screening the Posthuman (2023), and a contributor to edited volumes on national cinemas, genre and censorship. She has also published widely in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Open Cultural Studies, Frames Cinema Journal and Senses of Cinema.
A Taste of Honey (BFI Film Classics)
By
Melanie Williams
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, June 12, 2023 6PM
Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) is a multi-award-winning landmark film in British cinema history and one of the few key films of the British New Wave to have be written by a woman (Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own stage play).
Melanie Williams' study explores the many ways in which A Taste of Honey was innovative. It was one of the first films to be made almost entirely on location, its Salford, Manchester and Blackpool exteriors and interiors perfectly curated by production designer Ralph Brinton. It was shot by Walter Lassally in a style liberated from previous orthodoxies about good cinematography and was poetically assembled by visionary editor Anthony Gibbs. The film also launched a wholly new kind of female star in Rita Tushingham, and introducing new faces to British cinema, including Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah, and Robert Stephens. Perhaps most innovatively of all, it boldly but un-sensationally explored class, place, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, maternity, and their various intersections at this key moment in post-war British history. Teenage playwright Delaney's strikingly original dramatic vision was sympathetically rendered on screen by Tony Richardson, in perhaps the finest and most fully realised of all his films, and certainly among the finest achievements of the British New Wave he helped to instigate.
About the Author
Melanie Williams is Reader in Film and Television Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is author of Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (2017) and David Lean (2014). She is co-editor of Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered (2020), Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019), and Ealing Revisited (British Film Institute, 2012).
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, June 12, 2023 6PM
Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) is a multi-award-winning landmark film in British cinema history and one of the few key films of the British New Wave to have be written by a woman (Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own stage play).
Melanie Williams' study explores the many ways in which A Taste of Honey was innovative. It was one of the first films to be made almost entirely on location, its Salford, Manchester and Blackpool exteriors and interiors perfectly curated by production designer Ralph Brinton. It was shot by Walter Lassally in a style liberated from previous orthodoxies about good cinematography and was poetically assembled by visionary editor Anthony Gibbs. The film also launched a wholly new kind of female star in Rita Tushingham, and introducing new faces to British cinema, including Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah, and Robert Stephens. Perhaps most innovatively of all, it boldly but un-sensationally explored class, place, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, maternity, and their various intersections at this key moment in post-war British history. Teenage playwright Delaney's strikingly original dramatic vision was sympathetically rendered on screen by Tony Richardson, in perhaps the finest and most fully realised of all his films, and certainly among the finest achievements of the British New Wave he helped to instigate.
About the Author
Melanie Williams is Reader in Film and Television Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is author of Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (2017) and David Lean (2014). She is co-editor of Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered (2020), Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019), and Ealing Revisited (British Film Institute, 2012).
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, June 12, 2023 6PM
Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) is a multi-award-winning landmark film in British cinema history and one of the few key films of the British New Wave to have be written by a woman (Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own stage play).
Melanie Williams' study explores the many ways in which A Taste of Honey was innovative. It was one of the first films to be made almost entirely on location, its Salford, Manchester and Blackpool exteriors and interiors perfectly curated by production designer Ralph Brinton. It was shot by Walter Lassally in a style liberated from previous orthodoxies about good cinematography and was poetically assembled by visionary editor Anthony Gibbs. The film also launched a wholly new kind of female star in Rita Tushingham, and introducing new faces to British cinema, including Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah, and Robert Stephens. Perhaps most innovatively of all, it boldly but un-sensationally explored class, place, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, maternity, and their various intersections at this key moment in post-war British history. Teenage playwright Delaney's strikingly original dramatic vision was sympathetically rendered on screen by Tony Richardson, in perhaps the finest and most fully realised of all his films, and certainly among the finest achievements of the British New Wave he helped to instigate.
About the Author
Melanie Williams is Reader in Film and Television Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is author of Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (2017) and David Lean (2014). She is co-editor of Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered (2020), Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019), and Ealing Revisited (British Film Institute, 2012).
Lost in Translation (BFI Film Classics)
By
Suzanne Ferriss
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, May 8, 2023 6PM
Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate in philosophy, faces an uncertain professional future, while Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an established celebrity, questions his choices at midlife. Both are distant - emotionally and spatially - from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film's poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate.In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation's structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure. She details the complexities of filming (a 27-day shoot with no permits in Tokyo), explores Coppola's allusions to fine art, subtle colour palette and use of music over words, and examines the characters' experiences of the Park Hyatt Tokyo and excursions outside, together and alone. She also re-evaluates the film in relation to Coppola's other features, as the product of an established director with a distinctive cinematic signature: 'Coppolism'. Fundamentally, Ferriss argues that Lost in Translation is not only a cinema classic, but classic Coppola too.About the Author
Suzanne Ferriss is Professor Emeritus at Nova Southeastern University, USA. She has published extensively on fashion, film and cultural studies, and is the author of The Cinema of Sofia Coppola (2021). She is currently editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, May 8, 2023 6PM
Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate in philosophy, faces an uncertain professional future, while Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an established celebrity, questions his choices at midlife. Both are distant - emotionally and spatially - from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film's poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate.In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation's structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure. She details the complexities of filming (a 27-day shoot with no permits in Tokyo), explores Coppola's allusions to fine art, subtle colour palette and use of music over words, and examines the characters' experiences of the Park Hyatt Tokyo and excursions outside, together and alone. She also re-evaluates the film in relation to Coppola's other features, as the product of an established director with a distinctive cinematic signature: 'Coppolism'. Fundamentally, Ferriss argues that Lost in Translation is not only a cinema classic, but classic Coppola too.About the Author
Suzanne Ferriss is Professor Emeritus at Nova Southeastern University, USA. She has published extensively on fashion, film and cultural studies, and is the author of The Cinema of Sofia Coppola (2021). She is currently editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola.
PAST EVENT
Event: Monday, May 8, 2023 6PM
About the Author
Suzanne Ferriss is Professor Emeritus at Nova Southeastern University, USA. She has published extensively on fashion, film and cultural studies, and is the author of The Cinema of Sofia Coppola (2021). She is currently editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola.