Search results for ""author ian christie""

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain's most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place. From improving upon Edison's Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England's first film studio and launching the country's motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It's not only Paul's story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siecle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.

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Now fully updated, Scorsese on Scorsese is the definitive study of America's foremost film director, including new chapters on Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, the documentary My Voyage to Italy, and the epic Gangs of New York.True to its title, this book offers Martin Scorsese in his own words: through a career-length interview in which he recalls his upbringing in New York's Little Italy, and explains the inspiration and creation of his many great movies. The result is an incomparable insight into a body of work that is the most personal achievement in modern American cinema.Scorsese proves himself to be a terrifically articulate artist, whether recounting the many battles to get his movies made, his supreme passion for the medium of film itself, or the roots of his long-time creative partnership with actor Robert De Niro. Scorsese on Scorsese also contains a complete filmography, and a wealth of behind-the-scenes stills and sketches from Scorsese's own collection.

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The multiple award-winning Doctor Zhivago (1965) is one of America's finest films of all time. Ian Christie contextualizes the film as an epic Russian love story and a Cold War classic, charts its production and reception, including the contribution of designer John Box, and discusses the unique history of the Bruce Pasternak novel it is based on.

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Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) stars David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death, his love for the American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) threatened by medical, political and ultimately celestial forces. The film is a magical, profound fantasy and a moving evocation of English history and the wartime experience, with virtuoso Technicolor special effects. In the United States it was released under the title Stairway to Heaven, referencing one of its most famous images, a moving stairway between earth and the afterlife. Ian Christie's study of the film shows how its creators drew upon many sources and traditions to create a unique form of modern masque, treating contemporary issues with witty allegory and enormous visual imagination. He stresses the teamwork of Powell and Pressburger's gifted collaborators, among them Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, production designer Alfred Junge, and costume designer Hein Heckroth, and explores the history of both British and international responses to the film. Christie argues that the film deserves to be thought of as one of the greatest achievements of British cinema, but of all cinema.

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Over the decades since he was first hailed by critics and filmmakers around the world, Sergei Eisenstein has assumed many identities. Originally cast as a prophet of revolution and the maestro of montage, and later seen as both a victim of and apologist for Stalin’s tyranny, the scale and impact of Eisenstein’s legacy has continued to grow. If early research on Eisenstein focused on his directorial work – from the legendary Battleship Potemkin and October to the still-controversial Ivan the Terrible – with time scholars have discovered many other aspects of his multifarious output. In recent years, multimedia exhibitions, access to his vast archive of drawings, and publication of his previously censored theoretical writings have cast Eisenstein in a new light. Deeply engaged with some of the leading thinkers and artists of his own time, Eisenstein remains a focus for many of their successors, contested as well as revered. Over half a century since his death in 1948, an ambitious treatise that he hoped would be his major legacy, Method, has finally been published. Eisenstein's lifelong search for an underlying unity that would link archaic art with film’s modernity, individuals with their historic communities, and humans as a species with the universe, may have more appeal than ever today. And among his many thwarted film projects, those set in Mexico and what were once the Soviet Central Asian republics reveal complex and still-intriguing realms of speculation. In this ground-breaking collection, sixteen international scholars explore Eisenstein’s prescient engagement with aesthetics, anthropology and psychology, his roots in diverse philosophical traditions, and his gender politics. What emerges has surprising relevance to contemporary media archaeology, intermediality, cognitive science, eco-criticism and queer studies, as well as confirming Eisenstein's prestige within present-day film and audiovisual media.

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