BFI Silver – serie

The great Armenian-American director Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) remains a favourite among film-makers, his films combining great technical originality with a uniquely poetic visual style. Mamoulian's technical innovations are evident from his first film, Applause (1923), in which he incorporated two separate soundtracks into one printing, thus overcoming the difficulty of sound levels which had frustrated the pioneer directors of 'talkies', and in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), in which he used synthetic sound painted directly onto the soundtrack.  Such inventive solutions to film-making challenges were linked to Mamoulian's abiding sense of the magic of the cinema. Heused colour as a dramatic ingredient in the first three-strip Technicolour film, Becky Sharp (1935), and his musicals Summer Holiday (1948) and Silk Stockings (1957) were remarkable in their time for the way in which the dance was used to enhance the drama and to illuminate character.   And for Garbo, in Queen Christina (1933) he created the framework for her greatest role. Tom Milne's classic study, first published in 1969, provides a film-by-film analysis of Mamoulian's career and challenges widespread critical assumptions about the director's oeuvre. In his foreword to this new edition, Geoff Andrew recognises Milne's careful and insightful analysis of Mamoulian's expressive and imaginative style and asks whether this unique director ought to be considered as an auteur.   Andrew also pays tribute to Milne's elegant, witty and eclectic critical style and hails him as one the most important and influential British writers on film.TOM MILNE (1926-2005) was a leading British film critic, contributing to Sight & Sound, the Monthly Film Bulletin, The Observer, The Financial Times and The Times during his career. During the 1960s he worked at the British Film Institute as Associate Editor of Sight & Sound and Editor of The Monthly Film Bulletin. His other publications include a monograph on Joseph Losey (1967), a short study on the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (1971) and an anthology of interviews and writings on Jean-Luc Godard (1972) that he edited and translated.Foreword by GEOFF ANDREW, Head of Film Programme at BFI Southbank, UK, and the author of several books including Nicholas Ray: Poet of Nightfall (BFI, 2004) and, in the BFI Film Classics series, volumes on Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy and Kiarostami's 10.

The great Armenian-American director Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) remains a favourite among film-makers, his films combining great technical originality with a uniquely poetic visual style. Mamoulian's technical innovations are evident from his first film, Applause (1923), in which he incorporated two separate soundtracks into one printing, thus overcoming the difficulty of sound levels which had frustrated the pioneer directors of 'talkies', and in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), in which he used synthetic sound painted directly onto the soundtrack.  Such inventive solutions to film-making challenges were linked to Mamoulian's abiding sense of the magic of the cinema. Heused colour as a dramatic ingredient in the first three-strip Technicolour film, Becky Sharp (1935), and his musicals Summer Holiday (1948) and Silk Stockings (1957) were remarkable in their time for the way in which the dance was used to enhance the drama and to illuminate character.   And for Garbo, in Queen Christina (1933) he created the framework for her greatest role. Tom Milne's classic study, first published in 1969, provides a film-by-film analysis of Mamoulian's career and challenges widespread critical assumptions about the director's oeuvre. In his foreword to this new edition, Geoff Andrew recognises Milne's careful and insightful analysis of Mamoulian's expressive and imaginative style and asks whether this unique director ought to be considered as an auteur.   Andrew also pays tribute to Milne's elegant, witty and eclectic critical style and hails him as one the most important and influential British writers on film.TOM MILNE (1926-2005) was a leading British film critic, contributing to Sight & Sound, the Monthly Film Bulletin, The Observer, The Financial Times and The Times during his career. During the 1960s he worked at the British Film Institute as Associate Editor of Sight & Sound and Editor of The Monthly Film Bulletin. His other publications include a monograph on Joseph Losey (1967), a short study on the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (1971) and an anthology of interviews and writings on Jean-Luc Godard (1972) that he edited and translated.Foreword by GEOFF ANDREW, Head of Film Programme at BFI Southbank, UK, and the author of several books including Nicholas Ray: Poet of Nightfall (BFI, 2004) and, in the BFI Film Classics series, volumes on Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy and Kiarostami's 10.

Richard Roud's Godard, first published in 1967 as 'Number One' in the seminal Cinema One series, was the first monograph on the great film-maker to be published in English, and one that reveals a unique intimacy between the author and his subject. Roud's provocative and far-reaching analysis shows an intuitive understanding of the aesthetic, intellectual and political context in which Godard worked, paying particular attention to his 'political' cinema, including the ferocious masterpiece Weekend (1967).In his foreword to this reissue, Michael Temple provides an overview of film criticism on Godard, arguing that, more than forty years since its publication, Roud's book remains at the forefront of writings on the director. Temple pinpoints how Roud was uniquely placed as a contemporary of Godard's to follow the film-maker's career from one explosive film to the next, charting the course of the Godardian star even as Roud's own career as a critic and festival programmer was unfolding. He contends that Roud's study was 'a pure product – and a faithful reflection – of a certain tendency in British film culture at the end of the 1960s: cinéphile, progressive, European, intellectual, metropolitan.' For Temple, Roud's work remains a lucid summary of what Godard had already achieved by the end of the 1960s, and provides a suggestive model of cultural criticism with which to approach subsequent aspects of Godard's multimedia artistic adventure.

Upon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative, enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing and shot composition.In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early 1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho became one of its first objects.

First published in 1969, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema transformed the emerging discipline of film studies. Remarkably eclectic and informed, Peter Wollen's highly influential and groundbreaking work remains a brilliant and accessible theorisation of film as an art form and as a sign system.The book is divided into three main sections. The first explores the work of Sergei Eisenstein as film-maker, designer and aesthetician. The second, which contains a celebrated comparison of the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, is an expositionand defence of the auteur theory. The third formulates a semiology of the cinema, invoking cinema as an exemplary test-case for comparative aesthetics and general theories of signification. Wollen's Conclusion argues for an avant-garde cinema, bringingpost-structuralist ideas into his discussion of Godard and other contemporaries.Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this fifth edition features a new foreword by film theorist David Rodowick and brings together material from the four previous editions, inviting the reader to trace the development of Wollen's thinking, and the unfolding of the discourse of cinema.

First published in 1969, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema transformed the emerging discipline of film studies. Remarkably eclectic and informed, Peter Wollen's highly influential and groundbreaking work remains a brilliant and accessible theorisation of film as an art form and as a sign system.The book is divided into three main sections. The first explores the work of Sergei Eisenstein as film-maker, designer and aesthetician. The second, which contains a celebrated comparison of the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, is an expositionand defence of the auteur theory. The third formulates a semiology of the cinema, invoking cinema as an exemplary test-case for comparative aesthetics and general theories of signification. Wollen's Conclusion argues for an avant-garde cinema, bringingpost-structuralist ideas into his discussion of Godard and other contemporaries.Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this fifth edition features a new foreword by film theorist David Rodowick and brings together material from the four previous editions, inviting the reader to trace the development of Wollen's thinking, and the unfolding of the discourse of cinema.

Raymond Durgnat's classic study of British films from the 1940s to the 1960s, first published in 1970, remains one of the most important books ever written on British cinema. In his introduction, Kevin Gough-Yates writes: 'Even now, it astounds by its courage and its audacity; if you think you have an 'original' approach to a filmor a director's work and check it against A Mirror for England, you generally discover that Raymond Durgnat had said it already.' Durgnat himself said about the book that 'the main point was arranging a kind of rendezvous between thinking about movies and thinking, not so much about sociology, as about the experiences that people are having all the time.'Durgnat used Mirror to assert the validity of British cinema against its dismissal by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma and Sight and Sound. His analysis takes in classics such as In Which We Serve (1942), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Blue Lamp (1949), alongside 'B' films and popular genres such as Hammer horror. Durgnat makes a cogent and compelling case for the success of British films in reflecting British predicaments, moods and myths, at the same time as providing some disturbing new insights into a national character by whose enigmas and contradictions we continue to be perplexed and fascinated.

Writer and film-maker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary cultural theorists, credited for incorporating film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Part of the pathbeating 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent film-makers, she came to prominence with her classic essay on the pleasures – and displeasures – ofnarrative cinema, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. She went on to make her own avant-garde films, co-directed with Peter Wollen, and to write further, greatly influential works – including this one.Fetishism and Curiosity contains writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet, to an extended engagement with the creations of Native American artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work.Mulvey returns to some of the knottier issues in contemporary cultural theory, especially the links between looking, fantasy and theorisation on the one hand, and the processes of historical change on the other. What are the modes of address that characterise 'societies of the spectacle'? How might 'curiosity' be directed towards deciphering the politics of popular culture? These are just some of the questions raised in this brilliant and subtle collection.Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this new edition of Mulvey's classic work of feminist theory features a new, specially commissioned introduction and stills from the films discussed.