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 starting in May 2023, our Social Media 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!
Lost in Translation (BFI Film Classics)
By
Suzanne Ferriss
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.
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.
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.
A Taste of Honey (BFI Film Classics)
By
Melanie Williams
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).
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).
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).
Eraserhead (BFI Film Classics)
By
Claire Henry
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.
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.
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.