I am a film historian, curator, broadcaster and consultant, and have been Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 1999. I have written and edited books on early film, Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese and Gilliam (full details elsewhere on this site); and worked on exhibitions ranging from Film as Film (Hayward, 1979), Eisenstein: His Life and Art (MoMA Oxford, 1988) and Twilight of the Tsars (Hayward, 1991) to Spellbound: Art and Film (Hayward, 1996) and Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006). I also contribute regularly to radio and television programmes on cinema. These have included essays on Harold Pinter as screenwriter and on Bach as a film composer for Radio 3, as well as interviews for The Hundred Scariest Movies, The Thirties in Colour (BBC4), Scotland on Screen (BBC2), and Rude Britannia and Dive! Dive! Dive! (BBC4)

      Having been involved with pan-European media initiatives since the 1980s, I am currently a vice-president of Europa Cinemas and member of its Experts Committee. I was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994 and in 2005-06 served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, with a series of lectures entitled 'The Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented'. Recent lectures have included the first Richard Gregory Lecture for the Bristol Vision Institute at Bristol University ('What do we see in Films?') and the Nick Burton Memorial Lecture at Christchurch University, Canterbury (Blind Spots: What about the History that's not on Screen?')

      As a member of the Steering Group of London's Screen Archives Regional Network, I launched the London Screen Study Collection at Birkbeck in 2006 and currently serve on the UK Screen Heritage Programme Board. Current interests include the history of production design, early (and new) optical media, the cultural impact of film in the digital era and the potential of neuroscience to tell us more about what (and why) we experience on screen. Not to mention continuing fascination with the work and careers of Sergei Eisenstein, Michael Powell, Raul Ruiz, Aleksandr Sokurov and a few other eccentric folk.

    Quick Links

     Out now ...

    The Canons' Roar

     Every ten years, Sight and Sound takes

     the temperature of critical opinion with a 

     worldwide poll of the 'ten best films' of all

     time. I wrote about this in 1992 and 2002,

     and I still take a close interest in how

     cinema's 'canons' are shaped - not only by

     these lists, although they're an important

     forum for changing opinion.

     So are the 'year's best' lists published by

     many journals, and this year I contributed

     to those of Sight and Sound, Film Comment

     and Senses of Cinema. Here are the links:

    http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/films_of_2009 

    http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/jf10/best09.htm

    http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/featurearticles/2009world-poll/

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    The Art of Film: John Box

   and Production Design

     My book, based on interviews with John and

     surveying his full career was published by

     Wallflower Press at the end of July 2009.

   Above: Two films from 2009 neglected in critics'

    end of year polls: Terry Gilliam's The

    Imaginarium  of Dr Parnassus and Andrea

    Arnold's Fish Tank.

John Box seen here planning to build Aqaba from scratch - and in Spain rather than Jordan - with his art director Terry Marsh, for the famous camel charge in Lawrence of Arabia.

John won four Oscars and four BAFTAs for his spectacular yet often unobtrusive production design during a career that stretched from the end of the British studio system in the late 1940s to the early days of CGI on the mid 1990s.

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Researching R W Paul

Ten years ago, after writing and co-producing a television series on early cinema and what led up to it - The Last Machine (BBC2, 1994) - I began to research the enigmatic figure of Robert Paul (1866-1943), who produced Britain's first commercial 'animated photo-graphs' in 1895 (in a controversial partnership with Birt Acres). Paul went on to help launch the British film industry before closing his studio in 1909, to concentrate on scientific instrument making.

      My work on Paul has continued intermittently, with discoveries about his private life, viewing a remarkable original print of one of his films of Queen Victoria's 1897 Jubilee in the BFI National Archive, and curating a BFI DVD of Paul's extant films in 2006. I now ex-pect to finish this long-promised book during 2010.

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Measuring Film's New Cultural Impact

For several years I have been leading a workshop for Europa Cinemas personnel at the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato Festival, where we discuss how to link the 'old' experience of cinema with contemporary e-media. Recently, I have contributed to a study for the UK Film Council on The Cultural Impact of British Film, in which we explore how film's 'long tail' in digital media and the on-line blogosphere are amplifying film's cultural impact. A seminar to discuss the methodology of this study took place at Birkbeck on 27 Nov 2009.

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Sculpture and Film

I am working on an edited collection with Jonathan Wood, to be published by Ashgate in 2010

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