The films of Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988), among them I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death(1947), and The Red Shoes (1948), are landmarks in British cinema, standing apart from the realist and comic mainstream with a highly stylized aesthetic and themes of romantic longing and spiritual crisis. Film lovers and filmmakers alike revere Powell and Pressburger; Martin Scorsese has called them "the most successful experimental filmmakers in the world."
In this first-ever collection of essays on Michael Powell, an international group of critics and scholars map out his filmmaking skills, provide new readings of individual films, and analyze recurrent techniques and themes, relating the latter to contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, nationality, and cinematic spectacle.
Ian Christie is the author of Arrows of Desire: the Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1985, 1994) and has written and edited four other books about their work. He has organised many retrospectives and played a part in the films' restoration. He is currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a regular broadcaster. Andrew Moor is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Wales in Bangor. He is author of Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (2005) and contributed essays on Powell and Pressburger to a range of other publications.
Product Details
Paperback: 303 pages
Publisher: British Film Institute (January 22, 2008)
I am a film historian, curator, broadcaster and consultant, as well as Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 1999. I've 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).
Coming soon: I have chapters in a number of books, including Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, edited by Matthew Solomon (SUNY Press); and Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Edited by Rumiko Handa and James Potter (Nebraska.
I write regularly for the film journal Sight and Sound. I also contribute frequently to radio and television programmes on cinema - most recently an essay on Harold Pinter as screenwriter and on J S Bach as a film composer, both for BBC Radio 3; a contribution on Lenny Henry's favourite film (guess which?) on BBC Radio 2; and on TV, interviews for The Thirties in Colour (BBC4), Scotland on Screen, Dive. Dive, Dive!, and, forthcoming, The History of British Pathe and Rex Appeal.
