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London on Screen - this term's programme, Dickens's London, runs at the Birkbeck Cinema every Tuesday at 2.30 until 20 Mar, and a parallel programme, Not Strictly Dickens! runs at Stratford PIcturehouse on Wednesdays at 4.00 until 21 Mar. See below right for details
Coming next...
25 Jan - hosting a seminar by Tim Smith, of Birkbeck's Psychology Dept, on empirical studies of audio and visual cueing in our perception of film - using eye-tracking (below)
14 Feb - Introducing The Red Shoes for the National Film & TV School at BFI Southbank
26 Feb - Co-hosting Dance Scenes on Sunday #2 with Kiki Gale at Stratford Picturehouse, which will have clips from a wide range of dance styles, and feature five shorts commissioned by East London Dance in homage to Merce Cunningham.
28 Feb - Chairing New Screen Histories seminar by Peter Kramer at London University School of Advanced Studies: '"The greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler": Nuclear War and the Nazi past in DR STRANGELOVE', based on his research in the Kubrick Archive. Senate House, 6.00.
12 Mar - Introducing Eisenstein's October for NFTS Passport to Cinema series at BFI Southbank.
17 Mar - Taking part in 'War and Film' symposium at St Andrews University
20 Mar - 'Beyond 'The Film Society': clubs, societies, institutes, and the struggle to shape a film culture in Britain in the 1920s', talk at the XIX Udine International Film Studies Conference
24 Mar - Taking part in a panel on the history of copyright organised by Eric Hoyt at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston.
27 Mar - Animation studies conference in Utrecht
11-15 May - Introducing a British Film Week in Munich
And previously...
23 Jan - Introduced Michael Powell's 1961 The Queen's Guards, made in the aftermath of the Peeping Tom scandal, at BFI Southbank. Massey clan to the fore!
19 Jan - 'Why can't the English be modern?' - I led a Philosophy Salon discussion at the National Portrait Gallery, amid portraits of Herbert Read, Benjamin Britten and co (seen below, in 1943, with Peter Pears) as part of the NPG's Late Shift programme.
13 Jan - John Martin and the Apocalypse, at Tate Britain. I was talking about the apocalyptic tone of popular visual culture in the early 19c - and Martin's legacy among filmmakers ranging from Cecil B DeMille to George Lucas.
11 Dec - A short memorial talk about Raul Ruiz at Watershed in Bristol, by way of introduction to Mysteries of Lisbon.
9 Dec - Cours d'introduction pour le Forum des Images, Paris et leur cycle Londres, une ville au cinéma. J'ai parlé des 'Rues de Londres' (avec extraits, dont un de Bullet Boy)
3 Dec - Symposium at BFI Southbank on Aleksandr Sokurov -my contribution was 'Sonatas, Elegies, Diaries: scoping Sokurov's non-fiction forms', plus some thoughts about Faust and the 'tetralogy of power'
1-3 Dec - Screen Culture and the Social Question: Poverty on Screen 1880-1914 - a conference at the German Historical Institute in London, organised by Trier University's Screen 1900 Project. I chaired the opening session of this ambitious attempt to span the Magic Lantern and early moving picture periods of screen culture - and contributed to the last session with ideas about placing the lantern and early film in wider histories of both social propaganda and the visual, as well as more on researching social and cultural impact of these media.
27 Nov - Dance Sunday! - dance films co-presented with East London Dance at Stratford Picturehouse. Great fun - and our Bollywood extract, from Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na was the surprise hit of the programme!
23 Nov - Introduced Sokurov's TheStone - in which Chekhov comes back to his old home as a ghost (below); and on 29 Nov introduced Whispering Pages, both at BFI Southbank
6 Nov - London Rediscovered : introduced a programme of London films from the 50s at the Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley, drawn from the recentLSSC dvd
4 Nov - Panel discussion on the recent Polish film The Reverse at the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, BAFTA, London
2 Nov - Gave the first Peter Morris Memorial lecture at York University, Toronto:Where is 'national cinema' today - and who still needs it?
30 Oct - 'Stratford on Screen' - special archive programme at the Stratford PIcturehouse, as part of a collaboration between Birkbeck and PicturehouseCinemas in Stratford - with an extract from Joan Littlewood's Sparrows Can't Sing
29 Oct - Interviewed Aleksandr Sokurov at BFI Southbank to launch the major retrospective of his work that unrolls across November and December, with many previously unseen documentaries and elegies.
29 Oct - 'Screen History: Beyond Cinema' - took part in the Screen Studies Group's Postgraduate Training event at Birkbeck, Researching the New.
27 Oct - Hosted the first in a new series of Screen History seminars at the School of Advanced Studies of London University, with Thomas Elsaesser speaking about German documentaries of the 1920s and 30s and their problematic status between modernism and propaganda.
24 Oct - Introduced Sokurov's Faust, and its leading actors, at the LFF (see also my article in the December Sight and Sound)
22 Oct - Took part in a symposium on 'Subjectivity and Cinema' with Laura Mulvey, at theSorbonne Pantheon in Paris, to mark the publication of Dominique Chateau's new AUP anthology.
20 Oct - When Image Matters... I talked about portraits of Emma Hamilton, Horatio Nelson and The Duke of Wellington and the origins of celebrity culture in an informal 'Philosophy Salon' at the National Portrait Gallery
 
14 Oct - Introduced the magnificent restored Melies Trip to the Moon and Rossellini's Machine That Kills Bad People in an archive special at the London FilmFestival
11/12 Oct - London on Screen marked Black History Month with screenings of Horace Ove's pioneering film about Black Londoners, Pressure (1976) at Birkbeck Cinema and Stratford Picturehouse.
7-9 Oct - Europa Cinemas Experts Committee met in Warsaw, where we heard from the Polish Film Institute how they're successfully managing their national cinema - an example of which shows at EPFF on 4 Nov.
18 Sept - North London's early local filmmakers - Paul, Acres etc - as part of the Phoenix Cinema's very successful Open Day, with Gerry Turvey and me in conversation.
20-21 Sep - Spoke at a conference on film education in Miskolc, Hungary, as part of the Miskolc Festival - and visited Emeric Pressburger's birthplace (photos to follow...)
28 Sept - I talked about 'Early Film Stars in Europe' at the Deutsches Filminstitut-Trier University conference, Importing Asta Nielsen, in Frankfurt.
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29 Sept - Introduced Marleen Gorris's Mrs Dalloway at Cambridge Arts Cinema, as part of an event on Virginia Woolf and Cinema
30 Sept - Chaired a session at UCL Conference on Surveillance and Cinema, with some great papers on law and film, and on how YouTube is blowing apart courtroom secrecy and decorum.
1 Oct - Took part in BFI Southbank-RHUL conference on Ken Loach, speaking mainly about Land and Freedom.
2-4 Oct - Pordenone Giornate del cinema muto - showed, among much else, the newly discovered originalSoldier's Courtship of 1896 by R W Paul - Britain's first fiction film made for the screen - and full of inventive business by the actors!
16 Sept - Launch of Opening our eyes: how film contributes to the Culture of the UK, a report I co-authored, published by the BFI and hopefuly feeding into the current re-think of UK film policy. For the report and full data, see
13 Sept - Launch of the new London's Screen Archives website portal, at the Royal Institution, now viewable at http://www.londonsscreenarchives.org.uk/Londo/Main/
12 Sept - Took part in a roundtable at the EYE Institute in Amsterdam, to launch Subjectivity, the second book in our new AUP Key Debates series, edited by Dominique Chateau. Next up will be Audiences, ed by yours truly.
2-3 Sept - I led a workshop on attracting youth audiences to arthouse cinema and spoke about film education and exhibition in Europe, at the Japan Community Cinema Association annual conference in Hiroshima. Also visited Europa Cinema members in Tokyo and Kyoto.
17-23 Aug - I was a member of the Blue Chamelon Jury at the Cinema Digital Festival in Seoul, South Korea, where we have our prize to Sanjeewa Pushpakumara's tough and ambitious first feature Flying Fish (Sri Lanka, 2011, below) with a special mention for Xu Tong's equally striking documentary Shattered (China, 2011).
16-17 July - I led two tours of film locations in East London by barge, on the Regent's Canal. Starting near Mare Street Bridge we travelled through cinema history, passing close to some iconic film locations (Alfie, Smashing Time, Dirty Pretty Things, Secrets and Lies), looking back at the image of London's East End on screen, and finishing beside the site of one of Britain's first important film studios. At Gainsborough, Alfred Hitchcock launched his career in the late 20s, Ivor Novello starred as 'The Rat', and some classic WW2 films were made. For highlights of the tour on film, see http://floatingcinema.info/events/#events-96
13-15 July - Participated in the Re: Enlightenment Project exchange in London, at Senate House and the British Museum. More on this exciting initiative to follow...
2 July - The Second Centenary of Cinema - I spoke at a conference organised by Andrew Shail at Newcastle University on how Italian epics transformed cinema into a popular cultural spectacle between 1912-15.
July-Aug - I advised on films to accompany an exhibition of Australian prints and baskets at the British Museum. This started on with the latest restoration of the 1906 Story of the Kelly Gang (below)accompanied by Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly , and the programmes continued into August.
25-29 June - directed a workshop at the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato festival on 'Competing for Attention andSuccess', for selected exhibitors in the Europa Cinemas netwowork to reflect on the programming and promotion of their cinemas. Outline at http://www.europa-cinemas.org/en/actions/ya/seminaire-de-bologne.php, with a report to follow, including this year's Top Ten films for young audiences. I also introduced Korda's Thief of Bagdad (below) in the Piazza Maggiore, as part of Cinema Ritrovato's Conrad Veidt retrospective. Photo on Facebook!
23 June - Introduced Pt 2 of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible at BFI Southbank, and showed a fragment of the unmade Part 3
23 June - I convened a panel for the NECS Conference in London, on Cities and Cinema. Speakers were Ranita Chaterjee, Eleni Liarou, Peter Walsh and yrs truly, all talking about aspects of studying the city in/and cinema.
20 June - 'The Cultural Impact of Cinema' - took part in a seminar at the Irish Film Centre, sponsored by the Irish Film Board and BFI, based on Stories We Tell Ourselves.
9-10 June - Screenwriting for 3D cinema - I introduced the history of stereoscopy in a round table at the Monte Carlo Television Festival, along with screenwriter Michael Eaton.
27 May - Making Strange - Symposium on the legacy of Russian Formalism's ostranenie for film theory and the arts. Organised by the Dept of History of Art and Screen Media, at Birkbeck as part of Arts Week. Other speakers included Annie van der Oever (Groningen University), William Rowe (Birkbeck).
26 May - Talk on 'Film and 21st Century diplomacy', at Columbia University's Reid Hall, Paris
16 May - 'Truth or Dare: dilemmas for documentary', moderated a discussion at the UK Pavilion, Cannes Film Festival
14 May - Europa Cinemas AGM in Cannes: news about all our activities and initiatives - including this year's Bologna Workshop on Youth Audiences.
19 April - 'Content for the Online World': I took part in a panel with this title at the Conference on the Future of the Audiovisual Industry in Budapest, organised by the Ministry for National Development, to mark Hungary's presidency of the EU. Fellow panelists included Istvan Szabo and Peter De Maegd, and I tried to connect the on-line world with that of cinemas and audiences (in a EuropaCinemas sort of way...)
30 Mar - Artists Moving ImageNetwork: Symposium on Cognitive Psychological and Neuroscientific approaches to studying film reception at Chelsea College of Art, with Murray Smith, Tim Smith, Steven Hinde (see 19 Jan below)
29 Mar - London Screen Study Collection Workshop on Programming and Presenting London Archive Films
Organised by the LSSC at Birkbeck as part of DFAF project. See details on London Screen History tab and above. This was followed by launch of London Rediscovered, a new DVD of London films from the 1950s.
25-26 Mar - 'Twentieth Century Girls on Screen - Three Case Studies in Modernizing Fairy Tales'. I was talking about the arc from Powell/ Pressburger to Neil Jordan and Lars Von Trier,
at a York University conference on Myths and Fairy Tales.
Below: Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948)
18 Mar - 'Ancient Rome in London: Classical Subjects in Cinema's Expansion after 1910'. I gave a talk at an international conference on The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in assoc. with Bristol University.
17 Mar - I was recalling Jack Cardiff and introducing Craig McCall's documentary Cameraman at Egerton Film Society in Kent.
13 Mar - 'Beyond the Screen' - Igave a talk at the Fulldome conference in Birmingham's Thinktank Science Museum about the history of 'thinking beyond the screen', from the 18c Phantasmagoria, to proposals to modify the standard cinema screen by Eisenstein and Powell, up to the success of 3Dtoday.
28 Feb - took part in a useful conference organised by Film Education at Europe House on getting more European films shown in the UK, through education iniatives, film societies - and, yes, even cinemas!
18 Feb - 'Adventures in the Hit Parade: on-line archives' - I contributed to a symposium on Archives, Museums, Media organised by Dept of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck. G04, 43 Gordon Sq http://www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history/news/symposium-archives-museums-media
Feb - I didn't take part in the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, as a small personal gesture of support for the jailed Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. Panahi (below)i, director of such outstanding Iranian films as The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold and Offside, has been jailed for six years and forbidden to do any kind of film work for 20 years. What kind of 'justice' is this?
See reports in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/20/iran-jails-jafar-panahi-films and http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/24/jafar-panahi-film-iran-prison-banned and letters http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/24/iran-filmmakers-panahi-rasoulof; and (despite the bizarre heading) my letter at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/dec/27/iran-branson-sex-workers-windlesham
2 Feb - Beyond the Box-Office in Bristol, at Watershed MediaCentre: took part in a debateabout how England, and especially the South-West, has been represented on screen - from Lorna Doone to Tamara Drewe, via Gone to Earth, Straw Dogs, Jane Austen, Hot Fuzz, etc...
25 Jan - 'Illuminating Manuscripts: how graphic novels challenge the Gutenberg paradigm'. I spoke at the comparative literature conference 'Oltre la Pagina: Il Testo Letterario e le sue metamorfosi nell’età dell’immagine' at Universita degli Studi, Roma Tre (below: Raymond Briggs' Ethel and Ernest, Guido Crepax's Valentina; above: West Country modern and Hardy updated in Tamara Drewe)
 
23 Jan - I took part in adiscussion about the future of film heritage at the Premiers Plans festival in Angers, with Olivier Assayas, Serge Toubiana of the Cinematheque Francaise and other French contributors.[Below: why haven't we seen more of the Lumiere films since theirvery successful restoration in 1995?]
19 Jan - Artists Moving Image Research Network first symposium at Chelsea College of Art. I talked about the fear of losing film's 'indexicality' in the transition from analogue to digital, and asked how this related to the long history of concern about film's 'specificity'. [Below: The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928. Jean Epstein wrote extensively about the specificity of film and demonstrated his ideas on screen]
7 Jan - Beyond the Box-Office in York - one of the UK Film Council's series of regional debates about the cultural impact of British cinema. How has the North of England been represented on screen? - with Estelle Morris and producer Andy Harries (The Damned United, Zen, The Queen etc) At the splendid new Dept of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York.
26 Nov - 'How alternative is "Alternative Content" in cinema programming?': paper at a symposium on the history of film exhibition at the University of Utrecht
19-21 Nov - Took part in a opening-day panel on 'How can Film Theatres Appeal to the Web Generation' at the Europa Cinemas Annual Conference in Paris. I also reported on this year's Bologna Workshop on attracting youth audiences to European cinema. Conference report at http://www.europa-cinemas.org/en/actions/conference/2010_Conference_Programme_Presentations.php
15 Nov - Helped to launch '3D Week' at Bournemouth Media Academy, with a talk on the first century of stereoscopy - and why it might take off this time!
12 Nov - launch of a new book series I'm co-editing for AUP at the EYE Instituut in Amsterdam: the first book is Ostrannanie: On 'Strangeness' and the Moving Image, ed Annie van den Oever. See http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_book&isbn=9789089640796
11 Nov - Took part in at a symposium on Archiving in the Digital Era, at the National Library of Sweden, co-organised by the University of Stockholm (where I also discovered how successful Robert Paul's films were in Stockholm in the summer of 1897! - see About Me tab)
5 Nov - Introduced a 50th anniversary screening of Powell's Peeping Tom with Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker at BAFTA. See also new Powell DVD releases on About Me tab.
5 Nov - Spoke at a symposium in honour of the Russian film critic Maya Turovskaya, at Trinity College, Cambridge (see her book, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, which I edited in 1989). A recent reference to Turovskaya's work appearsin John Riley's article http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/the-steamroller-and-the-violin/
4 Nov - 'Before the Myth' - I was talking about the cultural and industrial background to Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin at a University of Essex Film Studies seminar.
31 Oct - Took part in a discussion on music and silent film after Hitchcock's Blackmail at the Barbican, with Neil Brand's fine new score played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Timothy Brock.
27 Oct - Copyrights and Wrongs - I co-organised and chaired a symposium for the British Academy and LCACE, at the Royal Society. MP3 audiorecording now available at http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2010/2010-Copyright.cfm
21 Oct - 'Something Stirring in the Stack: Why Filmmakers Enter the Library'. I gave the annual Holden Lecture on behalf of the Friends of Senate House Library, University of London - which included paying homage to the lasting association of Ghostbusters with the NYPL: now also a videogame (below).
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Publications, Media
 Online
Following Wikipedia's day of protest against new US legislation that could damage the freedom of the internet, I wrote an 'op-ed' piece for the British Academy's Public Policy web pages - viewable at http://www.britac.ac.uk/policyperspectives/christie.cfm
My report on the 5th Cinema Digital Festival in Seoul, South Korea, was in Sight & Sound online at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/newsandviews/ festivals/cindi-2011.php Also articles on the 'long history' of 3D in the November print edition of S&S; on Sokurov's Faust in the December issue.
 On the box
24 Dec - BBC4 Timewatch on Epics! A supporting role among a cast of - well - dozens, discussing mainly the golden years of the Ancient World epic in the 50s and 60s (although with a flash forward to Mongol and Avatar)
Walking with dinosaurs... I had a bit part in BBC 4's survey of dinosaurs on screen: Rex Appeal
21 Aug- 11 Sept: BBC4's The Story of British Pathe had contributions from me, and lots of great archive.
28 Feb - I commented on the Academy Awards, and what they mean for British cinema, on BBC World
 Recent radio pieces
16 Jan - Reviewed Ralph Fiennes' highly effective Coriolanus on Radio Three's Night Waves, and took part in discussion of the new Film Policy Review with Chris Smith
29 Dec/1 Jan - I helped to play the old year out and the new in on Radio Four's Film Programme, talking about what 'silent cinema' means today, with Maestro Neil Brand in the studio to illustrate effects.
7 Dec - Reviewed Raul Ruiz's haunting and magical Mysteries of Lisbon on Night Waves.
12 Oct - reviewed Danfung Dennis's Afghan doc To Hell and Back Again on Radio Three's Nightwaves
9 Sept - Reviewed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for Radio Four's Film Programme
24 June - Obituary on Gunnar Fischer for Radio Four's The Last Word.
23 May - Night Waves, Radio 3: I reviewed Martin Scorsese's new documentary on Elia Kazan
22 May - BBC World Service: I talked about the Cannes Palme d'or winner, Terrence Malick's Tree of Life
20 May - The Film Programme, Radio Four: I reviewed Karel Reisz's Isadora, newly reissued on DVD
 In print
¶ '"The Captains and the Kings depart": Imperial Departures and Arrivals in Early Cinema', chapter in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe's new collection Empire and Film (Palgrave, 2011)
¶ Is it too late to save 3D? See my article in the November issue of Sight and Sound - also an article about Scorsese's Hugo and its presentation of Melies in the January 2012 issue
¶ Catalogue entries for the Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto on Robert Paul's newly restored A Soldier's Courtship (1896); and for the Telluride Festival on Vasily Shukshin's Pechki-lavochki (Happy Go Lucky, 1972); and for the London Film Festival on Sokurov's Faust.
¶ I reviewed Patrick Russell's and James Piers Taylor's excellent Shadows of Progress, on British post-war documentary, in the March issue of Sight & Sound.
¶ I've written about Patrick Keiller's installation, The City of the Future, in the new BFI Gallery Book
¶ My chapter, 'Knight's Moves: Brecht and Russian Formalism in Britain in the 1970s', appeared in Ostranennie: On 'Strangeness' and the Moving Image, ed. Annie van den Oever, Amsterdam University Press, 2010 [that double nn is deliberate, in case you wonder... all explained in Annie's introduction]. A Symposium based on themes in the book formed part of Birkbeck's Arts Week on Friday 28 May.
Events, links and websites
London on Screen
Dickens's London
To celebrate Charles Dickens’s bicententenary, a selection of the film adaptations that have used – or more often recreated – the city that fed the novelist’s imagination. As well as many of the classic adapt-ations, this series includes rare screenings of the earliest feature-length Dickens film, Thomas Bentley’s 1913 David Copperfield, largely filmed at the novel’s locations, and of Christine Edzard’s mammoth and meticulous Little Dorrit, which will be shown over two consecutive weeks. On 14 Feb, William Raban will introduce his film inspired by Dickens’s night walks through London, made for the current Museum of London exhibition, accompanied by earlier films about Dickens’s London.
10 Jan Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) with John Mills, Valerie Hobson
17 Jan The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)
24 Jan Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) with John Howard Davis, Robert Newton
31 Jan David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley, 1913) accompanied by Stephen Horne
7 Feb A Tale of Two Cities (Ralph Thomas, 1958) with Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin
14 Feb The Houseless Shadow (William Raban, 2011); with Dickens’s London (1924)
21 Feb Little Dorrit (Christine Edzard, 1988) Pt 1: Nobody’s Fault with Derek Jacobi
28 Feb Little Dorrit Pt 2: Little Dorrit’s Story with Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood
6 Mar Scrooge (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1951) with Alastair Sim, Jack Warner
13 Mar David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) with Freddie Bartholomew, W. C. Fields
20 Mar Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968) with Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Shani Wallis
All screenings in the Birkbeck Cinema at 2.30pm. Another bicentenary series, ‘Not Strictly Dickens’, runs at the Stratford Picturehouse on Wednesday afternoons at 4.00, starting on 11 Jan with A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009) with Jim Carrey.
Local London ran Oct - Dec 2011
4 Oct London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009) + archive film of Hornsey. With Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kuyaté. Two strangers to London search for their children in the aftermath of 7/7 in this powerful plea for understanding
11 Oct Pressure (Horace Ove, 1976) +LSSC 'open hour'. With Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Norman Beaton A pioneering film about the pressures and choices facing Black youth, set in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill
18 Oct Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) + archive film of Covent Garden and LSSC ‘open hour’.
With Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Anna Massie. Hitchcock’s macabre return to his native London, where the necktie killer strikes in Covent Garden’s market
25 Oct Real Money (Ron Peck, 1996) + Exploring the East End on film – introduced by Ron Peck. An intimate account of the shadowy world where East End boxing and crime meet, acted by young boxers.
1 Nov The Bells Go Down (Basil Dearden, 1943) With Tommy Trinder, James Mason, Mervyn Johns
Ealing Studios’ wartime tribute to the Auxiliary Fire Service, as the Blitz hit the East End
8 Nov Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb, 2004). With Ashley Walters, Luke Fraser, Claire Perkins
Filmed in Hackney’s council estates, Saul Dibb’s debut feature explres the fascination of gun culture.
15 Nov Up the Junction (Peter Collinson, 1968) With Suzy Kendall, Denis Waterman, Maureen Lipman
Nell Dunn’s exposé of the underside of Swinging London in a well-observed Battersea
22 Nov Moon Over the Alley (Despins/Dumaresque, 1975) With Sean Caffrey, Debbie Evans
Future stunt-star Debbie Evans made her debut in this off-beat musical set in Notting Hill.
29 Nov Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) With Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright
Burglary leads to romance and new relationships in a multicultural Kings Cross
6 Dec It Always Rains on Sundays (Robert Hamer, 1947) With Googie Withers, John McCallum
Great British film noir, with an escaped convict returning to his old East End manor and his former love
13 Dec Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996) With Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn. Between Bethnal Green and Southgate, parallel lives begin to converge in an uplifting drama.
4 Oct London River (Romain Bouchareb, 2009)
The London Screen Study Collection Workshop on Programming and Presenting London Archive Film took place at Birkbeck on Tue 27 March, followed by the launch of our 1950s London DVD
The Summer London on Screen series was Royal London
3 May The Young Victoria (2009, Jean-Marc Valée) Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend
10 May Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles) Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau
17 May Richard III (Richard Lonraine) Ian McKellen, Annette Bening
24 May Elizabeth (1998, Shekhar Kapur) Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, MAL 532
31 May To Kill a King (2003, Mike Barker) Rupert Everett, Tim Roth, MAL 421
7 June Nell Gwyn (1934, Herbert Wilcox) Anna Neagle, Cedrick Hardwicke, B34
14 June The Madness of King George (1994, Nicholas Hytner) Nigel Hawthorne, B34
21 June The Prince and the Showgirl (1957, Laurence Olivier) Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, B34
28 June Leo the Last (1970, John Boorman) Marcello Mastroianni, Billie Whitelaw, B34
5 July The Queen (2006, Stephen Frears) Helen Miren, Michael Sheen
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The London Screen Study Centre's Spring term series was London Laughs
11 Jan The Knack... and How to Get It (1965, Dick
Lester) Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks
18 Jan Major Barbara (1941, Gabriel Pascal)
Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison
25 Jan Drole de Drame (1936, Marcel Carne)
Louis Jouvet, Francoise Rosay
1 Feb Passport to Pimlico (1949, Henry
Cornelius) Stanley Holloway, Betty Warren
8 Feb The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, Charles
Crichton) Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway
15 Feb A Kid for Two Farthings (1955, Carol
Reed) Celia Johnson, David Kossoff
22 Feb The Ladykillers (1955, Alexander Macken-
drick) Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker
1 Mar Black Joy (1977, Anthony Simmons)
Norman Beaton, Floella Benjamin
8 Mar A Fish Called Wanda (1988, Charles
Crichton) John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis
15 Mar Riff-Raff (1991, Ken Loach) Robert Carlyle,
Ricky Tomlinson, Emer McCourt
22 Mar Bend It Like Beckham (2002, Gurinder
Chadha) Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley
Free, 2.30pm, Tuesdays, Birkbeck Malet Street, London WC1, in B 34
See below for recent programmes in this series
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Victorian 3D!
During Bournemouth Media Academy's 3D week, in Nov 2010, I was talking about the success of stereoscopy in the1860s and how film pioneers from Lumiere to Eisenstein always believed that cinema would eventually be in 3D
http://www.bsma.ac.uk/3dweek/programme
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Rethinking Media Archivism - an international workshop at the National Library of Sweden, 9-11 Nov 2010
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London on Screen - past programmes
Autumn Term, 2010
Surviving London
A season of films about the experience of learning how to survive in London, and succeeding or failing. This is perhaps the archetypal 'London story', from the tale of Dick Whittington's success to the many stories of those who are defeated by London's challenge and temptations. This is also a story of London becoming increasingly multiethnic. And the films selected span the revival of British cinema in the 1930s, the 'new wave' of the 60s, and the growing importance of television in supporting British filmmaking.
12/10 Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) John Mills, Alec Guinness
19/10 Evergreen (Victor Saville, 1934) Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale
26/10 Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde
2/11 Georgy Girl (Silvia Nazzarino, 1966) Lynn Redgrave, James Mason
9/11 Cathy Come Home (Ken Loach, 1966), Carol White, Ray Brooks
16/11 Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platts-Mills, 1969) Del Walker, Sam Shepherd
23/11 Bleak Moments (Mike Leigh, 1971) replaced Leo the Last, previously advertised.
30/11 Sparrows Can't Sing (Joan Littlewood, 1963) replaced My Beautiful Laundrette, previously advertised
7/12 Safe (Antonia Bird, 1993) Aidan Gillen, Kate Hardie, Robert Carlyle
14/12 Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007) Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik
And previously -
A discussion on theatre and cinema during WW2 inspired by the revival of Rattigan's Flare Path (Night Waves, Radio 3, 9 Mar); a review of True Grit on Nightwaves, 9 Feb, and a double obituary for Maria Schneider and Lena Nyman on Last Word, Radio Four, 11 Feb.
18 Jan 2011 - BBC Radio Four's Film Season kicked off with the first of two programmes about early cinema history: Hollywood The Prequel and, on 25 Jan, The Sequel. I popped up in both, and also in other programmes in this season, on Exploding Cinema, Pocket Cinema, Secret Cinema, and on filmgoing round the world. more info at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/film-season/ | |
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