Category: Cinema & Film
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Metal brains and melancholia: Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher
This was the introduction I gave for a screening of Epstein’s 1928 film at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster on 1/11/25, with live accompaniment by Neil Brand. This film is an adaptation of the short story The Fall of the House of Usher by American writer Edgar Allan Poe that was published in 1839. There have been…
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Community music
In Tokyo-ga, his 1985 documentary about Japan and the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, German director Wim Wenders observes that, despite never having been there, he feels he knows Japan intimately through having watched so many Japanese films, including those of Ozu. I feel exactly the same, but nevertheless I still harbour a burning desire to go…
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The lost worlds of silent cinema.
A real pleasure this weekend to attend the ‘Silents by the Sea’ film festival put on by the Northern Silents organisation at the Winter Gardens Pavilion in Morecambe, a grand variety theatre built in the 1890s, and currently undergoing restoration. It’s a particularly apt setting since some of the films screened over the weekend may…
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Magic cameras and maniacs: Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’
Helen (Anna Massey) and Mark (Carl Boehm) in Peeping Tom An introduction to the screening of the film at the Dukes cinema, Lancaster, 4/2/24: Peeping Tom is a late film by Michael Powell, one of the major British directors of the 20th century. He first began making films in the early 1930s, when British studios were…
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Full Metal Jackoff and the naming of parts: Kubrick, process and pedagogy.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to see a rare screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) as part of the wonderful Bay International Film Festival in Morecambe, organised by Anna Kumacheva, who has recently graduated with a PhD from my department at Lancaster University. Rewatching the film for the first time in years, it is…
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The world’s first micro-film festival
During the pandemic lockdown when Lancaster University switched to remote learning for the academic year starting in October 2020, among other problems, we were faced with the challenge of what our new Film Studies students would do during Fresher’s week. The need for social distancing precluded any introductory group events, but in any case, many…
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Writing on the walls, tearing down the walls: refugee art and transformation
I have recently run a series of film-making workshops in conjunction with the Lancaster-based charity Global Link, which co-ordinates education programmes and welfare support for asylum-seekers and refugees in the area. The charity moved offices earlier this year, to a Georgian terrace near the centre of town. and speaking to their executive director last month, I…
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Interview with director Harry MacQueen
A video recording of an interview I did in 2021 with the director and actor Harry MacQueen to accompany a screening at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster of his quietly moving road movie, Supernova (2020), which was shot and set in the Lake District and starred Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth.
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Man(n)ly films: ‘Heat’, masculinity and control
Although I use a clip from Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) in a first-year lecture to demonstrate the principles of classical continuity editing, it’s a while since I’ve watched any of the director’s films. However, I recently watched the fascinating new TV crime series Tokyo Vice, produced by Mann, who directed the first episode, and was prompted by this…
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Cinemagoing in Lancaster in the 1920s
To mark the centenary of Lancaster City Museums, they are publishing a series of podcasts focusing on aspects of their collection, ‘100 years, 100 Objects’. The podcasts are conversations between museum staff and members of local community groups and academics. For episode no. 19, which can be found here, I spoke with the museum registrar…
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Pictures of Passion and Pain: Fassbinder and Ozon
Introduction to a screening of Peter von Kant at the Dukes cinema, Lancaster, 8th Feb, 2023. Peter von Kant is an adaptation of the 1972 film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of the most well-known works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder was one of a group of young film-makers who began making films in West…
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Boats, bicycles and histories of violence.
I’ve been familiar with the work of exiled superstar artist/activist Ai Weiwei for some time, but have taken a particular interest in it over the last few years because of the way my own research has intersected with some of the preoccupations that run through his work. He has produced a large series of works…
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Fugitive aesthetics and refugee cinema
I’m currently working on a project on refugee cinema with my regular collaborator and writing partner, Katarzyna Marciniak. Based on work that we’d done as co-authors and as co-editors, we were invited by an editor at Oxford University Press to develop a book on the topic, and we have been working on this for a…
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Studies in film
During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, when we shifted our teaching online, I worked with undergraduate and MA students on the Film programme at Lancaster University to set up an online student-led film journal, Cut/To. My idea was that it would allow the film students to maintain social contact while they were scattered around the…
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Repetition and difference: Three faces of Chaplin
Earlier this year I was asked to suggest three feature films by Charlie Chaplin for screening at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster to accompany the release of a new documentary about the film-maker, The Real Charlie Chaplin (Middleton, Spinney, 2021), and to write a blog post for their website. This is a slightly expanded version of that…
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Andrew Kötting: the dirty work of making films
When planning a conference at Lancaster University on Mobilities Studies a couple of years ago, I asked the artist-film-maker Andrew Kötting to come and speak about his work as the closing plenary, and he agreed to screen his newest film, Edith Walks (2017) and do a Q and A with me and Brian Baker. While…
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The book of the film
With my friend and colleague Brian Baker, I’ve been working on a series of short films for some time, shooting on digital video and Super 8. For various reasons we’ve been unable to devote much time to this project over the last year, but we were able to spend most of yesterday working on the…
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Cahier du Cinema 4: First annual report
This is the fourth part of the list of the films I’ve watched this year although it’s not entirely comprehensive; I haven’t included films I’ve watched parts of (when I’ve come into the room when someone else is half-way through a film and sat down alongside them), and films I’ve watched more than once (where…
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Cahier du Cinema 3: viewing list
Looking back over these lists of films I’ve watched this year, the context in which I watched them is as often memorable as – if not more so than – details from the films themselves. This was something that my former colleague Annette Kuhn found in her research into cinema-going in Britain in the 1930s;…
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Cahier du cinema 2: viewing list
Looking back at this list of films watched between April and June, there are rather more titles than would be normal for this busy time of year, but the combination of the strike over pensions and several weeks of illness meant that I had more time than usual for watching films. 1/4/18 – Isle of…
Bruce Bennett 