Film
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Launched to the press today with an hour-long presentation and Hitchcockian lunch, the British Film Institute proudly unveiled a fittingly hefty programme of screenings, events, exhibitions and publications celebrating the work of Alfred Hitchcock - inarguably Britain’s most iconic and influential film director. Hailing from London’s East End, Hitchcock worked in the British film industry for two decades before signing a deal with David O. Selznick and decamping to Hollywood, where he continued to go from strength to strength with films such as Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo.The BFI’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship, a young generation of directors were producing some of the best films in the world. It was never going to be easy to choose just 20 to reflect that, but our task as curators would have been a lot easier if one country, Argentina, wasn’t producing quite so many wonderful films.The Argentine Film Festival, at London’s Ritzy this weekend, is a first Read more ...
fisun.guner
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the wunderkind of New German Cinema, worked at a prodigious rate. By the time of his death in 1982, aged just 37, he’d made over 40 feature films and directed over half as many stage plays. He also made films specially commissioned for television, something that was certainly looked down upon by both mainstream and avant-garde film-makers in the Seventies. Treating his television projects with no less commitment, Fassbinder was an arthouse film-maker who broke the mould in many ways, though his output must be said to be of vastly variable quality.I Only Want You to Read more ...