Search results
the Everyday in Post War Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts ( New York : Berghahn Press ). Crary , Jonathan ( 2013 ), 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep ( London : Verso ). Freud , Sigmund ( 1961 [1920]), Beyond the Pleasure Principle ( London : Hogarth Press and the Institute of
(1938) – this realist mode of production always incorporated theatrically inspired scenes shot in studio. So did Pagnol’s original screenplays, including Merlusse (1935), Cigalon (1935), César , and La Fille du puisatier (1940). His two best post-war films, Naïs (1945) and Manon des sources (1952) were photographed almost entirely on location and confirmed his seminal influence on Italian neo-realism (Leprohon 1976
metropolises of high modernity. These films also tend to be products of an artisanal rather than a commercial imperative, frequently incorporating found footage, and fragments from alternative image systems, into their documentary mise en scène. In many cases, they may even be more familiar to students of animation, assemblage and collage, photography, or post-war film modernism, than to students of the documentary. As figures who can relate to cinema through other arts, the filmmakers discussed in Regarding the Real convey an ambitious, experimental sense of what the
Clair, but he was also drawn by the documentaries of Cavalcanti and John Grierson.’ Continued Patrick: ‘Charles regarded comedy seriously; he would say, “Comedy is creation; tragedy is all too easy, it is but a reflection of life.” When he did direct films of serious content he was deeply involved emotionally, as with The Divided Heart . But in some ways he despised himself for showing that emotion; perhaps it was all part of his distaste of pomposity.’ The late Alexander Walker, one of Britain’s best and acutest post-war film commentators, who had followed
would be any moment in which the point of view (the enunciation) of the director, who in this case is the middle-class outsider, stands out from the supposedly objective narrative of the film. C. Mello, ‘Everyday Voices: The Demotic Impulse in English Post-war Film and Television’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 2006). N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom: Pop From the Beginning (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 63–4. R. Hewison, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75 (London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 66–7. Bobby Scott, who was the musical director of Broadway
. 5 Richard MacDonald, ‘Screening Classics: Film Appreciation Canons and the Post-War Film Societies’, in Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground , pp. 208–36; p. 210. 6 (Anon.), ‘A Gallery of Prize-Winners’, Amateur Cine World (May 1951), pp. 28–9; p. 28. 7 MacDonald, ‘Screening Classics: Film Appreciation Canons and the Post-War Film Societies’, p. 210. 8 Information from Enrico Cocozza’s scrapbook of newspaper cuttings, held by the Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland, item
-ranging appropriation of generic elements from the action film genre and specifically various examples of earlier tough guy film-making. The essential premise of the first film is taken from D . O . A . (1949), itself remade in 1988, a classic post-war film noir directed by Rudolph Maté in which Edmond O’Brien’s character has been poisoned with an incurable toxin and has just days to find
in a melodramatic mode. Asquith’s post-war films reflect upon the Edwardian middle-class family, its morality and politics, in The Winslow Boy; on an English public school centred on a restrained and repressed schoolmaster in The Browning Version; on the leisured life of the idle rich in The Importance of Being Earnest; and on the resonantly English world of cricket in The Final Test. Such films, when looked at as a composite, MUP_Ryall_08_Chap 8 165 7/26/05, 10:09 AM 166 anthony asquith offer a series of meditations on the national character, on national
), Violent Playground (1958) and Beat Girl (1960) (‘System as Stalemate’). Most of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films appear alongside Asquith’s The Demi-Paradise (1943), Hitchcock’s The Skin Game (1931) and Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) in ‘The Nine Lives of Colonel Blimp’; the post-war films turn up in ‘Between Two Worlds’ where Powell is classified as a romantic
degradation over the past decade […] has been sad to watch.’ In actual fact, these ‘lesser’ films provide a visual consistency with Duvivier’s earlier career and cement his auteur status. The classicism of the mise en scène, evocative location shooting, and core thematic concerns –deception, misanthropy, the fragility of the (male) group, the dangerous woman –remain largely intact in these later works. I noted earlier that Duvivier’s post-war films signalled the emergence of several distinct tendencies: works that highlighted their own construction (Sous le ciel de Paris