Böcker i BFI Film Classics-serien

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is widely regarded as one of the best films ever made. It has been celebrated for its beauty and mystery, its realistic depiction of space travel and dazzling display of visual effects, the breathtaking scope of its story, which reaches across millions of years, and the thought-provoking depth of its meditation on evolution, technology and humanity's encounters with the unknown. 2001 has been described as the most expensive avant-garde movie ever made and as a psychedelic trip, a unique expression of the spirit of the 1960s and as a timeless masterpiece. Peter Krämer's insightful study explores 2001's complex origins, the unique shape it took and the extraordinary impact it made on contemporary audiences, drawing on new research in the Stanley Kubrick Archive to challenges many of the widely-held assumptions about the film. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite.James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory.Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

A visually stunning and heartfelt riposte to the emotional sterility of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Douglas Trumbull's eco-themed Silent Running (1972) became one of the defining science-fiction films of the seventies.

Widely believed to be Terry Gilliam's best film, Brazil's brilliantly imaginative vision of a retro-futuristic bureaucracy has had a lasting influence on genre cinema. Exploring its complex history and relationship with other dystopias, Paul McAuley explains why this satire on the unchecked power of the state is more relevant than ever.

Alien, that legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, was born out of a terrible monster movie script called Star Beast. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, this book explores how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings.

Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of "Pulp Fiction". He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

The release of Star Wars in 1977 marked the start of what would become a colossal global franchise. Star Wars remains the second highest-grossing film in the United States, and George Lucas's six-part narrative has grown into something more: a culture that goes far beyond the films themselves, with tie-in toys, novels, comics, games and DVDs as well as an enthusiastic fan community which creates its own Star Wars fictions. Critical studies of Star Wars have treated it as a cultural phenomenon, or in terms of its special effects, fans and merchandising, or as a film that marked the end of New Hollywood's innovation and the birth of the blockbuster. Will Brooker's illuminating study of the film takes issue with many of these commonly-held ideas about Star Wars. He provides a close analysis of Star Wars as a film, carefully examining its shots, editing, sound design, cinematography and performances. Placing the film in the context of George Lucas's previous work, from his student shorts to his 1970s features, and the diverse influences that shaped his approach, from John Ford to Jean-Luc Godard, Brooker argues that Star Wars is not, as Lucas himself has claimed, a departure from his earlier cinema, but a continuation of his experiments with sound and image. He reveals Lucas's contradictory desires for total order and control, embodied by the Empire, and for the raw energy and creative improvisation of the Rebels. What seemed a simple fairy-tale becomes far more complex when we realise that the director is rooting for both sides; and this tension unsettles the saga as a whole, blurring the boundaries between Empire and Republic, dark side and light side, father and son.In his foreword to this new edition, Will Brooker discusses is how subsequent films in the series, specifically Rogue One (2016) and The Last Jedi (2017), foregrounded and developed the themes of opposition that are at the heart of Star Wars. He shows how Derridean theories of opposites which become undermined and subverted, and which change places are made more clear with hindsight and provide us with a useful lens for looking back at the 1977 Star Wars.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is one of the most historically pivotal of all films. The first American film of the celebrated German director F.W. Murnau, Sunrise tells the story of a love triangle between characters named only as The Man, The Wife, and The Woman from the City.Lucy Fischer's compelling study of the film shows how it mediates between German expressionism and American melodrama, the avantgarde and popular film, silent cinema and 'talkies'. A lavish and sumptuous production famous for its vast, specially-constructed sets, and one of the first feature films with a synchronized musical score and sound effects soundtrack, Sunrise was one of early Hollywood's most ambitious undertakings. In her foreword to this new edition, Lucy Fischer considers the film as an abiding classic of world cinema.

Amy Sargeant's compelling and meticulous study of Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) sets the film in the context of a long tradition of fictional depictions of the master-servant relationship, from Shakespeare to Cervantes, Henry James, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Sargeant points out that while many of these relationships are played for comic effect, that of the 'young master' Tony (James Fox) and his manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) unfolds in a far more sinister manner, with Barrett coming to dominate and humiliate the hapless Tony.Sargeant's reading pays particular attention to the contribution not only of Losey and Harold Pinter, who adapted the screenplay from Robin Maugham's novella, but also of the cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, designer Richard Macdonald and costume designer Beatrice 'Bumble' Dawson. She analyses the performances of Sarah Miles as Barrett's lover Vera and Wendy Craig as Tony's fiancee Susan, as well as those of Fox and Bogarde, and gives careful consideration to how the film uses architectural form, interior design and decoration, and clothing to establish character and relationships. In the context of the collapse of the British Empire, and a beleaguered Establishment beset by spy and sex scandals, the film can be read, Sargeant argues, as a metaphor for the 'state of the nation' in the early 1960s.Finally, Sargeant considers the film's critical and commercial reception in Britain, Europe and the United States - its release, how it was received as one of a number of 'emigre' films, and Losey's surprising denial of a homoerotic intent in the Tony-Barrett relationship.In her new foreword to this edition, Amy Sargeant considers contemporary resonances of the film's depiction of a twisted master-servant relationship in recent TV and cinema including The Crown, Downton Abbey and The Trial of Christine Keeler.

Brief Encounter (1945), adapted from Noel Coward's play Still Life, is a classic of British cinema - a tale of impossible love between a married woman and a man she meets while waiting for a train. Though it's a film made by men, it is the woman's voice we hear recounting the story of a small-town love affair and her renunciation of it. In his lucid analysis of the film, Richard Dyer explores how its depiction of powerful feelings kept under wraps is a definitive example of a particularly English style of emotional restraint, but also how it spoke to a gay audience for whom this subject - forbidden love between ordinary people - had a special resonance.This reissued edition features original cover artwork by Rania Moudaress and a substantial new foreword that revisits the film and recent readings of it, covering its enduring legacy and adaptation for theatre and television.

Kim Newman's fascinating study focuses on Roy Ward Baker's 1967 film, written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale for Hammer Films, but also looks at the origins of the Quatermass franchise in 1950s BBC serials and earlier films.

Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999 at his Hertfordshire home, having finished the editing of his last film. Looked at this way, Eyes Wide Shut reveals itself to be a deeply moving film about characters who are not so different from real people, a film about life in which questions of meaning and motive lose their value.

Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), won a total of 76 awards and is one of the most commercially successful Spanish-language films ever made.

Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of 'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to rise?The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his bowling commitments.In part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes, phonies and poseurs with put-on identities.Like many Coen films, the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling. In their foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world. The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens, revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.

Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989) is one of the most popular and celebrated examples of the African-American new black film wave. Set during the hottest day of a hot summer in New York City, the film's ensemble cast, including Lee himself, brilliantly play out the edgy negotiations and dramas of a racially and culturally diverse working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Contrary to Hollywood's markedly cautious treatment of 'race' and its confinement to the South and the past, Do The Right Thing offers a nuanced portrayal of black urban life.From hip-hop fashions, Afrocentric colors and rap music, to police brutality, gentrification, non-white immigration, de-industrialization and joblessness, Do The Right Thing depicts it all, from a contemporary, African-American point of view. In his insightful study of the film, Ed Guerrero discusses how it epitomizes Spike Lee's powerful impact on the representation of race and difference in America, the progress of black film-making and the rise of multicultural voices in the media. This new edition includes a foreword by the author reflecting on Lee's subsequent film-making career and on an America in which African-Americans still contend with racial discrimination and police brutality. Guerrero emphasizes Lee's especially timely understanding of black film-making as a complex act, mixing the skills of art, politics, and business in order to fashion a creative practice that confronts institutional discrimination and power relations head on.

Vertigo (1958) is widely regarded as not only one of Hitchcock's best films, but one of the greatest films of world cinema.

Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a trainruns across the sea. Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film's delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film's visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki's prior body of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.This edition includes a new foreword by the author in which he considers the world of animated cinema post-Spirited Away, considering its influence on films ranging from del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth to Pixar's Inside Out.

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.Camille Paglia's foreword to this new edition reflects upon the relationship between Hitchcock and his leading lady Hedren in the light of recent debates about male power, female agency and the #MeToo movement.

Thelma & Louise, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Callie Khouri, sparked a remarkable public discussion about feminism, violence, and the representation of women in cinema on its release in 1991. Subject to media vilification for its apparent justification of armed robbery and manslaughter, it was a huge hit with audiences composed largely but not exclusively of women who cheered the fugitive central characters played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Marita Sturken examines Thelma & Louise as one of those rare films that encapsulates the politics of its time. She discusses the film's reworking of the outlaw genre, its reversal of gender roles, and its engagement with the complex relationship of women, guns adn the law. The insights of director Scott, screenwriter Khouri as well as Davis and Sarandon are deployed in an analysis of Thelma & Louise and the controversies it sparked. This is a compelling study of a landmark in 1990s American cinema.In her foreword to this new edition, Sturken looks back on the film's reception at the time of its release, and considers its continuing resonances and topicality in the age of #MeToo.

Fellini's La dolce vita has been a phenomenon since before it was made, a scandal in the making and on release in 1960 and a reference point ever since. Much of what made it notorious was its incorporation of real people, events and lifestyles, making it a documentation of its time. It uses performance, camera movement, editing and music to produce a striking aesthetic mix of energy and listlessness, of exuberance and despair. Richard Dyer's study considers each of these aspects of the film - phenomenon, document, aesthetic - and argues that they are connected. Beginning with the inspirations and ideas that were subsequently turned into La dolce vita, Dyer then explores the making of the film, the film itself and finally its critical reception, providing engaging new insights into this mesmerising piece of cinema.

Starring James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, "Performance" was made by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg in 1968, but not released until 1970.

Winston Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and tried to have it banned when it was released in 1943. But Martin Scorsese, a champion of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, considers it a masterpiece. It's a film about desires repressed in favour of worthless and unsatisfying ideals. And it's a film about how England dreamt of itself as a nation and how this dream disguised inadequacy and brutality in the clothes of honour. A. L. Kennedy, writing as a Scot, is fascinated by the nationalism which The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp explores. She finds human worth in the film and the pathos of stifled emotions and unfulfilled lives. 'If he is unaware of his passions, ' she writes of Clive Candy, the film's central figure, 'this is because his pains have become habitual, a part of personality, and because he was never taught a language that could speak of emotions like pain.'.This edition includes a foreword by the author exploring the film's continuing relevance in an age of Brexit, when English and British national identity are deeply contested concepts.

Singin' in the Rain remains one of the best loved films ever made. In a shot-by-shot analysis of the famous title number, Peter Wollen shows how Gene Kelly binds the dance and musical elements into the narrative, and convincingly argues that the film was the high point in the careers of those who worked on it.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy, is often cited as the 'best' and most popular Star Wars movie. In her compelling study, Rebecca Harrison draws on previously unpublished archival research to reveal a variety of original and often surprising perspectives on the film, from the cast and crew who worked on its production through to the audiences who watched it in cinemas.Harrison guides readers on a journey that begins with the film's production in 1979 and ends with a discussion about its contemporary status as an object of reverence and nostalgia. She demonstrates how Empire's meaning and significance has continually shifted over the past 40 years not only within the franchise, but also in broader conversations about film authorship, genre, and identity. Offering new insights and original analysis of Empire via its cultural context, production history, textual analysis, exhibition, reception, and post-1980 re-evaluations of the film, the book provides a timely and relevant reassessment of this enduringly popular film.

First released in 1987, Near Dark is a vampire film set in the contemporary American Midwest that tells the story of Caleb, a half-vampire trying to decide whether to embrace his vampire nature or return to his human family. The film, an early work of the now-established director Kathryn Bigelow, skilfully mixes genre conventions, combining gothic tropes with those of the Western, road movie and film noir, while also introducing elements of the outlaw romance genre.Stacey Abbott's study of the film addresses it as a genre hybrid that also challenges conventions of the vampire film. The vampires are morally ambiguous and undermine the class structures that have historically defined stories of the undead. These are not aristocrats but instead they capture the allure and horror of the disenfranchised and the underclass. As Abbott describes, Near Dark was crucial in consolidating Bigelow's standing as a director of significance at an early point in her career, not simply because of her visual art background, but because of the way in which she would from Near Dark onward re-envision other traditionally mainstream genres of filmmaking.

Traces the history of The Shawshank Redemption, originally a low-key prison movie, from the pages of Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" to the screens on which it became a phenomenon, as well as exploring the near-religious fervour that the film inspires in its devoted fans.

On the face of it, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1989) is a film in which the eyes - and mouths - of religious zealots are opened to the glories of the sensual world. It is a critique of what Nietzsche called life-denying religion in favour of life-affirming sensuality. But to view the film in that way is to get it profoundly wrong. In his study of the film, Julian Baggini argues that Babette's Feast is not about the battle between religiosity and secularity but a deep examination of how the two can come together. Baggini's analysis focuses on themes of love, pleasure, artisty and grace, to provide a rich philosophical reading of this most sensual of films.

Rosemary's Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant popular entertainment, it finds its home on the cusp between a cinema of sentiment and one of sensation. Michael Newton's study of the film traces its development at a time when Hollywood stood poised between the old world and the new, its dominance threatened by the rise of TV and cultural change, and the roles played variously by super producer Robert Evans, the film's producer William Castle, director Polanski and its stars including Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Newton's close textual analysis explores the film's meanings and resonances, and, looking beyond the film itself, he examines its reception and cultural impact, and its afterlife, in which Rosemary's Baby has become linked with the terrible murder of Polanski's wife and unborn child by members of the Manson cult, and with controversies surrounding the director. Rosemary's Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant popular entertainment, it finds its home on the cusp between a cinema of sentiment and one of sensation. Michael Newton's study of the film traces its development at a time when Hollywood stood poised between the old world and the new, its dominance threatened by the rise of TV and cultural change, and the roles played variously by super producer Robert Evans, the film's producer William Castle, director Polanski and its stars including Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.Newton's close textual analysis explores the film's meanings and resonances, and, looking beyond the film itself, he examines its reception and cultural impact, and its afterlife, in which Rosemary's Baby has become linked with the terrible murder of Polanski's wife and unborn child by members of the Manson cult, and with controversies surrounding the director.

Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical Hollywood cinema. Richard Deming's study of the film explores its relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, which apparently Welles never read; traces the film's production history and provides an insightful close analysis of its key scenes, including its famous opening sequence, a single take in which the camera follows a booby-trapped car on its journey through city streets and across the border.