Download or read book Michael Balcon Presents a Lifetime of Films written by Michael Balcon and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ealing Revisited written by Mark Duguid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ealing Revisited provides a major reappraisal of one of British cinema's best-loved institutions, Ealing Studios. During its heyday, Ealing produced a string of classic comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), but there is much more to Ealing than these films, as this volume of new writing on the studio shows. Addressing both known and less familiar aspects of Ealing's story, its films, actors and technicians, the contributors uncover what has gone unexplored, or unspoken, in previous histories of the studio, and consider the impact that Ealing has had on British cultural life from the 1930s to the present. Listed in the Independent on Sunday's Cinema books of 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ios-books-of-the-year-2012-cinema-8373713.html
Download or read book Past and Present written by James Chapman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-09-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book takes as its focal point director Ken Loach's view that 'The only reason to make films that are a reflection on history is to talk about the present.' In the first book to take on this major genre in all its complexity, James Chapman argues that historical films say as much about the times in which they are made as about the past they purport to portray. Through in-depth case studies of fourteen key films spanning the 1930s up to the turn of the twenty first century, from The Private Life of Henry VIII and Zulu to Chariots of Fire and Elizabeth, Chapman examines the place of historical films in British cinema history and film culture. Looking closely at the issues that they present, from gender, class and ethnicity to militarism and imperialism, he also discusses controversies over historical accuracy, and the ways in which devices such as voice overs, title captions, and visual references to photographs and paintings assert a sense of historical verisimilitude. Exploring throughout the book the dialectical relationship between past and present, Chapman reveals how such films promote British achievements - but also sometimes question them - and how they project images of 'Britishness' to audiences both in the UK and internationally.
Download or read book Jew Suss written by Susan Tegel and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), better known as Jew Suss, was a court Jew, who advised the Duke of Wurttemberg. Clever and handsome, even ostentatious, he fitted easily into court life, despite his humble origins. However, his unpopular economic policies made him enemies and when the Duke died suddenly Suss was arrested, convicted of 'destestable abuses' and exectued in Stuttgart in an iron cage. His spectacular rise and fall inspired a media outpouring in the eighteenth century and he has been much written about subsequently. In the twentieth century two films were made about him, one British in 1934, the other German in 1940. Goebbels took an active interest in the latter. After the war its director, Veit Harlan, was tried for Crimes against Humanity for having made the film. Despite his acquittal, the film's association with the Holocaust remains controversial to this day. For almost three centuries the life of Jew Suss has been adapted, distorted and transformed. This book tells the story of these transformations.
Download or read book British Cinema of the 1950s written by Sue Harper and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this definitive and long-awaited history of 1950s British cinema, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter draw extensively on previously unknown archive material to chart the growing rejection of post-war deference by both film-makers and cinema audiences. Competition from television and successive changes in government policy all forced the production industry to become more market-sensitive. The films produced by Rank and Ealing, many of which harked back to wartime structures of feeling, were challenged by those backed by Anglo-Amalgamated and Hammer. The latter knew how to address the rebellious feelings and growing sexual discontents of a new generation of consumers. Even the British Board of Film Censors had to adopt a more liberal attitude. The collapse of the studio system also meant that the screenwriters and the art directors had to cede creative control to a new generation of independent producers and film directors. Harper and Porter explore the effects of these social, cultural, industrial, and economic changes on 1950s British cinema.
Download or read book History of British Film Volume 4 written by Rachael Low and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set is one of the cornerstones of film scholarship, and one of the most important works on twentieth century British culture. Published between 1948 and 1985, the volumes document all aspects of film making in Britain from its origins in 1896 to 1939. Rachael Low pioneered the interpretation of films in their context, arguing that to understand films it was necessary to establish their context. Her seven volumes are an object lesson in meticulous research, lucid analysis and accessible style, and have become the benchmark in film history.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History written by I.Q. Hunter and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive and revisionist overview of British cinema as, on the one hand, a commercial entertainment industry and, on the other, a series of institutions centred on economics, funding and relations to government.
Download or read book Alfred Hitchcock All the Films written by Bernard Benoliel and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized chronologically and covering every short film, television episode, and classic film that the "Master of Suspense" directed over the course of his illustrious, 60-year career, Alfred Hitchcock All the Films draws upon years of research to tell the behind the scenes stories of how each project was conceived, cast, and produced, down to the creation of the costumes, the search for perfect locations, and of course, the direction of some of cinema's most memorable scenes. Spanning more than six decades, and including stories of work with longtime collaborators like costume designer Edith Head, title designer Saul Bass, and composer Bernard Herrmann, this book details the creative processes that resulted in numerous classic films like Vertigo,The Birds,Psycho, Rear Window, North By Northwest,andTo Catch a Thief (to name a few). The director's classic TV series are also covered extensively along with original release dates, lesser-known short films, box office totals, surreptitious casting details, and other insider scoops that will keep fans and students alike turning pages. Alfred Hitchcock All the Films is the perfect book for the movie fan in your life.
Download or read book The British Cinema Book written by Robert Murphy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of The British Cinema Book has been thoroughly revised and updated to provide a comprehensive introduction to the major periods, genres, studios, film-makers and debates in British cinema from the 1890s to the present. The book has five sections, addressing debates and controversies; industry, genre and representation; British cinema 1895-1939; British cinema from World War II to the 1970s, and contemporary British cinema. Within these sections, leading scholars and critics address a wide range of issues and topics, including British cinema as a 'national' cinema; its complex relationship with Hollywood; film censorship; key British genres such as horror, comedy and costume film; the work of directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Asquith, Alexander Mackendrick, Michael Powell, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell and Mike Leigh; studios such as Gainsborough, Ealing, Rank and Gaumont, and recent signs of hope for the British film industry, such as the rebirth of the low-budget British horror picture, and the emergence of a British Asian cinema. Discussions are illustrated with case studies of key films, many of which are new to this edition, including Piccadilly (1929) It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), The Ladykillers (1955), This Sporting Life (1963), The Devils (1971), Withnail and I (1986), Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and Control (2007), and with over 100 images from the BFI's collection. The Editor: Robert Murphy is Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University and has written and edited a number of books on British cinema, including British Cinema and the Second World War (2000) and Directors in British and Irish Cinema (2006). The contributors: Ian Aitken, Charles Barr, Geoff Brown, William Brown, Stella Bruzzi, Jon Burrows, James Chapman, Steve Chibnall, Pamela Church Gibson, Ian Conrich, Richard Dacre, Raymond Durgnat, Allen Eyles, Christine Geraghty, Christine Gledhill, Kevin Gough-Yates, Sheldon Hall, Benjamin Halligan, Sue Harper, Erik Hedling, Andrew Hill, John Hill, Peter Hutchings, Nick James, Marcia Landy, Barbara Korte, Alan Lovell, Brian McFarlane, Martin McLoone, Andrew Moor, Robert Murphy, Lawrence Napper, Michael O'Pray, Jim Pines, Vincent Porter, Tim Pulleine, Jeffrey Richards, James C. Robertson, Tom Ryall, Justin Smith, Andrew Spicer, Claudia Sternberg, Sarah Street, Melanie Williams and Linda Wood.
Download or read book The Big Screen written by David Thomson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 1010 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence over us, and the technology that made the screen—smaller now, but ever more ubiquitous—as important as the images it carries. The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. At first, film was a waking dream, the gift of appearance delivered for a nickel to huddled masses sitting in the dark. But soon, and abruptly, movies began transforming our societies and our perceptions of the world. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media—moving from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs, from Sunrise to I Love Lucy, from John Wayne to George Clooney, from television commercials to streaming video—to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life—the stories, the stars, the look—and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room. Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book. Books about the movies are often aimed at film buffs, but this passionate and provocative feat of storytelling is vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens—the age that, more than ever, we are living in.
Download or read book Hitchcock and the Spy Film written by James Chapman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film historian James Chapman has mined Hitchcock's own papers to investigate fully for the first time the spy thrillers of the world's most famous filmmaker. Hitchcock made his name as director of the spy movie. He returned repeatedly to the genre from the British classics of the 1930s, including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, through wartime Hollywood films Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur to the Cold War tracts North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and his unmade film The Short Night. Chapman's close reading of these films demonstrates the development of Hitchcock's own style as well as how the spy genre as a whole responded to changing political and cultural contexts from the threat of Nazism in the 1930s and 40s to the atom spies and double agents of the post-war world.
Download or read book Destination London written by Tim Bergfelder and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacy of emigrés in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance. Focusing on areas such as exile, genre, technological transfer, professional training and education, cross-cultural exchange and representation, it begins by mapping the reasons for this neglect before examining the contributions made to British cinema by emigré directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, set designers, and composers. It goes on to assess the cultural and economic contexts of transnational industry collaborations in the 1920s, artistic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, and anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1940s.
Download or read book The Private Life of Henry VIII written by Greg Walker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2003-04-25 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Korda's masterpiece "The Private Life of Henry VIII" was arguably the most important British film of the pre-war period and a phenomenal, critical and box-office success. Greg Walker's accessible and thoroughly researched book examines the film itself, its makers and its place in the cinematic and cultural history of the period. He examines Korda's subtle treatment of national and "international" identity, his representation of British history, use of modern stereotypes, and discusses the representation of gender and sexuality in the film, including that of Henry's wives and Laughton's award-winning central performance.
Download or read book Millions Like Us written by Nick Hayes and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays brings together the latest historical research on cultural production and reception during the Second World War. Its starting point is how this war was presented to, and understood by, contemporaries and how they differentiated it from earlier conflicts. Although this was particularly noticeable in the construction of ideas of inclusiveness and commonality where ‘the people’ pulled together to secure victory and a socially equitable peace, the essays also seek to explore the diversity of institutional and personal experiences. Essays look at major national institutions and industries such as the recently formed BBC, the culturally diverse and rapidly expanding commercial press, and the British film industry. The collection explores the role of the individual agent, with studies on established writers and composers, and how each related to the collective rationales of wartime.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Ealing Studios written by Robert Sellers and published by Aurum. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind-the-scenes account of life at Ealing Studios – one of the great cinematic success stories of post-war Britain, and a byword for a particular strain of comic filmmaking that continues to inspire imitators over half a century on. This will be the first full narrative history of the studio, focusing on its output in the 1940s and '50s, when the movies made there were in astonishing (and revealing) synchronicity with the national mood. Told through the memories of the people who worked and performed there, The Secret Life of Ealing Studios will explore how a small group of maverick filmmakers, some of Britain’s most fondly remembered movie stars, and a lot of unsung backroom boys and girls created pictures that presented a unique and enduring view of British identity, and which have since become classics. Particular emphasis will be placed on the filming of Hue and Cry (1947), Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Whisky Galore (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), along with war films such as The Cruel Sea (1953). At the heart of the story will be the figure of Michael Balcon - perhaps the closest Britain has ever come to producing a movie mogul in the Hollywood mould - and iconic actors such as Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford and Sid James. The author is one of Britain's leading entertainment biographers and has a number of successful and critically lauded titles under his belt (his recent book on Oliver Reed, What Fresh Lunacy Is This?, was selected for Books of the Year round-ups in both the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday). Robert has a track record of securing original testimony from first-hand witnesses and has already begun interviewing people who worked at Ealing.
Download or read book Fifty Key British Films written by Sarah Barrow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fifty Key British Films, Britain's best known films such as Clockwork Orange, The Full Monty and Goldfinger are scrutinised for their outstanding ability to articulate the issues of the time. This is essential reading for anyone interested in quality, cult film.
Download or read book A Year of Fear written by Bryan Senn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eclectic overview of horror cinema offers up a collection of horror films for practically any occasion and literally every day of the year. For example, the author recommends commemorating United Nations Day (October 24) with a screening of The Colossus of New York, whose startling climax takes place at the U.N. Building. Each day-by-day entry includes the movie title, production year, plot summary and critique, along with a brief explanation of how the film fits into the history of that particular day and interesting anecdotes on the film's production.
