BFI film classics

It is considered by many to be the finest British film ever made. A stirring masterpiece like no other. The indelible General Clive Candy barely survives four decades of tumultuous British history (1902 to 1942), only to see the world change irrevocably before his eyes. Blimp is both moving and slyly satirical, an incomparable film about war, love, and aging.

The Seventh Seal is probably the best-known work of one of the world's great film-makers, the one which most clearly has Bergman's unmistakable signature on it. The opening scene sets the tone: a stony beach under a leaden sky, the knight alone with his thoughts, then the approach of black-clad Death, whom the knight invites to play a game of chess. Bergman's medieval allegory of faith and doubt is dark with the horrors of witch-burnings and the plague. But it is also. shot through with bright flashes of peace and joy, symbolised in the milk and wild strawberries offered to the knight by an innocent family of actors. In a finely written appreciation, Melvyn Bragg describes his own first encounter as a student with this extraordinary film, and how it revealed to him another cinema, quite different from the Hollywood he had grown up with. He recounts too his later meeting with Bergman himself, and how the marks of his powerful. personality are everywhere in this troubling but inspiring masterpiece.

For Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz is more than a children's film, and more than a fantasy. It's a story whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, in which the weakness of grown ups forces children to take control of their own destinies.

Distributed by Indiana University Press, Analysis of film made by Jean Renoir in 1932.

"In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) an ageing cleaning women, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), marries a much younger man, immigrant Moroccan mechanic, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Set in Munich during the 1970s, Fear Eats the Soul melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility in order to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. Emmi's family (including her slovenly and spiteful son-in-law Eugen, played by Fassbinder himself), neighbours and workmates turn against her viciously. It is a film about the way conventional society detests anything and anybody unfamiliar - but also a film about the hopes and limits of love. Intricately directed and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitschiness, and beautifully performed, Fear Eats the Soul may be Fassbinder's finest film." "Laura Cottingham celebrates Fassbinder's achievement, placing Fear Eats the Soul in relation to his extraordinary prolific career in theatre, film and television. Her analysis pulls back the thin curtain that separated his work from his tumultuous life. She also explores the director's debt to the lush Hollywood melodrama made by fellow-German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis of Fear Eats the Soul, Cottingham show how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique."--Jacket.

Counter Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, with its jagged, stylized sets, evocative shadows, and themes of murder, madness, and delirium, remains the source and essence of German Expressionist Cinema. Fusing carnival spectacle with the paranoia of the psychological thriller, it centers on the haunting, sexually ambivalent presence of Conrad Veidt, as a somnambulist exploited as an instrument of murder by the sinister Dr. Caligari. David Robinson challenges long-accepted versions of the history of reception of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, redefining its relationship to the larger phenomenon of Expressionist art. His reassessment of the relative contributions of director and writer becomes a fascinating detective story, as he investigates in-depth the status and significance of the recently rediscovered scenario for Caligari.