to Irma Vep

Sep 11, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Lillian Crawford |to Irma Vep |Bérénice Reynaud

Director Robert Hamer was one of the most prolific and accomplished directors to rise through the ranks of Ealing Studios. He was famous for both comedies – in particular Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and School for Scoundrels (1960) – and crime films, especially The Long Memory (1953) and The Scapegoat (1959). His greatest crime thriller, however, was undeniably his pitch-black 1947 drama It Always Rains on Sunday.

Sep 6, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Lillian Crawford |to Irma Vep |Bérénice Reynaud

David Lean was one of Britain’s most successful directors. Few managed to match his effective mixing of artful visuals, emotional depth and accessible drama, building a highly respected career littered with masterpieces such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Sep 3, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Lillian Crawford |Michael Brooke |Sam Wigley |to Irma Vep

“All art is one, man, one,” Michael Powell wrote, defining his concept of the ‘composed’ film. It was an idea borne of Wagner’s application of the aesthetic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, translated by Brecht into ‘epic theatre’ and Powell into cinema: that is, the fusion of multiple art forms into a single whole. For example, music and image brought together as opera or ballet, and then heightened in cinema through editing and camerawork.