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Aug 22, 2024 | 
source.ie | Isabel Stevens
Issue 68 Autumn 2011View Contents ▸View Photographs by Jane and Louise Wilson ▸Isabel Stevens: When did you first begin working seriously with photography? Louise: We were about nineteen when we got a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex during our undergrad. But we studied in the days when people got upset when you described your photographs as fine art.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
source.ie | Isabel Stevens
Issue 67 Summer 2011View Contents ▸"Nobody should touch a Polaroid until he’s over sixty" was Walker Evans’s maxim. It was only at that age, when Evans’s fingers started to fail him that he turned to the small and instantaneous image to revisit the street signs and scenes he had shot early in his career.
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Jun 24, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Brogan Morris |Jessica Kiang |Mike Kohler |Isabel Stevens
Sidney Lumet left an immense body of work behind him when he died in 2011. In the 50-year stretch from his first feature to his last, he racked up a total of 44 films (which is to say nothing of the dozens of hours of television he also directed, at the beginning and end of his career). To anyone approaching the Lumet catalogue fresh, such volume alone would be intimidating. Equally imposing, though, is the director’s reputation as an American master.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Talkies |Jessica Kiang |Mike Kohler |Isabel Stevens
“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive,” wrote Joan Didion in 1977, toward the end of what had been the driest recorded three-year period in California history. But anyone who’s seen Roman Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown, released on midsummer eve in 1974, the year that dry spell began, must have reverence for California’s water struggles.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Mike Kohler |Isabel Stevens |Hayley Scanlon |Jonathan Romney
Sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience, and I've always believed audiences are moved and excited by what they hear in my movies at least as much as by what they see.”George LucasA typical dictionary offers many definitions of acoustic ‘sound’ – covering energy transfer, neurological perception, media content, collectively, such as ‘the sound of The Beatles,’ and environmentally, as in ‘within the sound of the church bells’. Sound invites cross-sensory and emotional response.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Isabel Stevens |Mike Kohler |Hayley Scanlon |Jonathan Romney
Agnieszka Holland was a precocious 15-year-old when she decided to become a filmmaker. She has notebooks from those years in which she wrote that three things were important to her: visual expression (she originally wanted to be a painter), telling stories, and – the really precocious bit – power, although she didn’t want to be a politician to get it. “It was the mid-60s, when cinema was very artistic, original and personal,” she tells me.
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May 13, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Isabel Stevens
Many women artists have been reappraised in the last decade and exhibitions and books have sought to remove some from the shadow of the men with whom they were involved with romantically (Lee Krasner; Dora Maar). But what are we to make of a woman who was desperate to disappear? A figure who further complicates the feminist endeavour of rescuing overlooked artists because she was in a relationship with another woman who took the spotlight?
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Josephine Botting |Mar Diestro-Dópido |Bruno Savill De Jong |Isabel Stevens
A woman desperately pursues a frenzied, dishevelled man along the banks of the Thames at Hammersmith. To shake her off, he pushes her roughly to the ground in front of a dilapidated riverside pub. The film is London-set noir Night and the City (1950) and burned-out spiv Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is running headlong to his death, while long-suffering girlfriend Mary Bristol, played by Gene Tierney, tries to hold him back. It was 1949, and Tierney’s career had flourished over the decade.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Bruno Savill De Jong |Isabel Stevens |Margaret Hinxman |Becca Voelcker
The Teachers’ Lounge is the latest in a recent wave of films – from Monster to The Holdovers – that grapple with the challenges and compromises of being a schoolteacher. Teachers are having a tough time. Between underfunded institutions, potential union strikes, and paranoia about pupils being ‘corrupted’, the thankless roles of educators have been put under increased scrutiny.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Isabel Stevens |Margaret Hinxman |Becca Voelcker |Jonathan Romney
The films we watch as children cast their spell on us and watching them as adults, exiled from our childhoods, gives us a brief interlude back there.
