Books in the BFI Film Classics series

This study offers a fresh approach to the remarkable German film The Lives of Others (2006), known for its compelling representation of a Stasi surveillance officer and the moral and ethical turmoil that results when he begins spying on a playwright and his actress lover.Annie Ring analyses the film's cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing, tracing connections with Hollywood movies such as Casablanca and Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in the film's portrayal of an individual rebelling against a brutal dehumanising regime. Drawing on archival sources, including primary research from the Stasi files themselves, as well as Enlightenment philosophies of art and Brecht's theories on theatre dating from his GDR years, she explores the film's strong but much-disputed claims to historical authenticity. She examines the way the film tracks the world-changing political shift that took place at the end of the Cold War - away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the dreams of the private individual, arguing that this is what makes it at once widely appealing and fascinatingly problematic. In doing so, she highlights why The Lives of Others is a crucial film for thinking at the horizon between film and recent world history.

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.

Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. This new edition of Bukatman's study of Blade Runner is published in the BFI Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author and a stunning new jacket design by Paul Pope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), filmed by Maya Deren and her then husband Alexader Hammid in their bungalow above Sunset Boulevard for a mere $274.90, is the most important film in the history of American avant-garde cinema. The artistic collaboration between Deren and Hammid finds its distorted reflection in the vision of the film's tormented female protagonist. Its focus - through a series of intricate and interlocking dream sequences - on female experience and the domestic sphere links Meshes to the Hollywood melodramas of the period, while its unsettling atmosphere of dread, death and doubles makes it a counter-cinematic cousin to film noir. The film has influenced not only the subsequent history of experimental film, but also on the work of Hollywood auteurs. It is a touchstone of women's film-making, of modern cinema and of modern art. John David Rhodes traces the film's history back into the lives of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, but in particular that of Deren. He reads the film as a culmination of Deren's abiding interest in modernism and her intense engagement in socialist politics. Rhodes argues that while the film remains a powerful point of reference for feminist film-makers and experimentalists, it is also an example of political art in the broadest terms.In his foreword to this new edition, Rhodes reflects upon the film's continuing importance for and influence upon feminist and avant-garde filmmaking.

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.

Ever since its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in May 2005, audiences have been talking about Michael Haneke's Caché. The film's enigmatic and multi-layered narrative leaves its viewers with many more questions than answers. The plot revolves around the mystery of who is sending a series of sinister videos and drawings to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), the presenter of a literary talkshow. As Georges becomes increasingly secretive, much to the distress of his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a culprit fails to surface. And even at the film's end, audiences are left struggling to make sense of what has gone before.This hasn't stopped people trying. In an in-depth and illuminating account, Wheatley examines the key themes at the heart of the 'meaning' of Caché: the film as thriller; post-colonial bourgeois guilt; political accountability and lastly, reality, the media and its audiences, tracing these strands through the film by means of close readings of individual scenes and moments. Inspired by the director's claim that we might understand the film as a set of Russian dolls, each of which is complete in itself but together forms a whole in which layers of unseen depth are concealed, Wheatley avoids a single, unifying approach to understanding Caché. Instead, her detailed analysis of the film's shifting perspectives opens up the multiplicity of meanings that Caché contains, in order to understand its secrets.This edition includes a new foreword in which the author reflects upon Caché in the context of Haneke's subsequent work, and considers the film's contemporary resonances in an era of omnipresent surveillance technology and doctored 'fake news' videos.

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.

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.

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.

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

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. As Greil Marcus reconstructs the drama, The Manchurian Candidate is a movie in which the director and actors, including Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in an Academy Award-nominated performance, were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. This edition includes a new foreword highlighting the movie's terrifying contemporary relevance in the age of Trump and Russian interference in the US Presidential election.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

Metropolis (1925) is a monumental work. One of the greatest works of science fiction, it also tells human stories about love and family. This new edition of Elaesser's study is published in the Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author, and a stunning new jacket design by Cristiana Couceiro.

With its jagged, stylised sets, menacing shadows and themes of murder, madness and delirium, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) remains the source and essence of German Expressionist 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.

Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of Macbeth, is widely considered the greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare ever made.In a detailed account of the film, Robert N. Watson explores how Kurosawa draws key philosophical and psychological arguments from Shakespeare, translates them into striking visual metaphors, and inflects them through the history of post-World War II Japan. Watson places particular emphasis on the contexts that underlie the film's central tension between individual aspiration and the stability of broader social and ecological collectives - and therefore between free will and determinism. In his foreword to this new edition, Robert Watson considers the central characters' Washizu and his wife Asaji's blunder in viewing life as a ruthless competition in which only the most brutal can thrive in the context of an era of neoliberal economics, resurgent 'strongman' political leaders, and myopic views of the environmenal crisis, with nothing valued that cannot be monetized.

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.

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.