Books in the BFI Film Classics series

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 In her compelling study, Rebecca Harrison draws on previously unpublished archival research to reveal a variety of original and often surprising perspectives on the film, from the cast and crew who worked on its production through to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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is the definitive film about the nuclear age. Peter Kramer analyses its key scenes and complex production history, highlighting major themes such as Strangelove's Nazi past and the film's close relationship with real-world nuclear strategy and politics.

Also examining its production processes, Butler explores the against-type casting of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in lead roles and the intertwined careers of Kaufman and director Michel Gondry. This special edition features original cover artwork by Patricia Derks.

Successful in both Japan and the West, Akira had a huge impact on the international growth in popularity of manga and anime. Closely analysing the film and its key themes, Colin O'Dell and Michelle Le Blanc assess its historical importance, its impact on the Western perception of anime, and its influence on science fiction cinema.

Renoir's famous and controversial comedy of manners has a troubled history. Victor Perkins presents here a sensitive socio-historical study of Renoir's revised edition of the film, released 20 years after its premiere; shaped by the profundity and originality of its form.

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974) Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of racism and everyday hypocrisy in post-war Germany. 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, beautifully performed, and designed to show Munich life in all its shabby kitschiness, 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 extraordinarily 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 melodramas made by fellow German Douglas Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows (1955). In a detailed scene-by-scene analysis, Cottingham shows how Fassbinder managed to combine beauty and tenderness with fierce political critique.

One of the greatest collaborations of cinema history, L'Âge d'Or(1930) united the geniuses of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in the making of a Surrealist masterpiece - a uniquely savage blend of visual poetry and social criticism. The film was banned and vilified for many years in many countries, becoming justly legendary for its subversive eroticism and its furious dissection of 'civilised' values.In a remarkable, intuitive reading of L'Âge d'Or, Paul Hammond interweaves a detailed account of the extraordinary circumstances of its production with a dazzling interpretation of its aesthetic and political nuances. At once authoritative and polemical, this is a study entirely in tune with its subject, a fitting celebration of a major landmark in world cinema.

The Seventh Seal is probably Bergman's best-known work and the film that most clearly bears the director's unmistakeable signature. 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 his compelling 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 the director's powerful personality are everywhere in this troubling and inspiring masterpiece.

The Big Sleep: Marlowe and Vivian practising kissing; General Sternwood shivering in a hothouse full of orchids; a screenplay, co-written by Faulkner, famously mysterious and difficult to solve. Released in 1946, Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler reunited Bogart and Bacall and gave them two of their most famous roles. The mercurial but ever-manipulative Hawks dredged humour and happiness out of film noir. 'Give him a story about more murders than anyone can keep up with, or explain,' David Thomson writes in his compelling study of the film, 'and somehow he made a paradise.'When it was first shown to a military audience The Big Sleep was coldly received. So, as Thomson reveals, Hawks shot extra scenes, 'fun' scenes, to replace one in which the film's murders had been explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved. Thomson argues that, if this was accidental, it also signalled a change in the nature of Hollywood cinema: 'The Big Sleep inaugurates a post-modern, camp, satirical view of movies being about other movies that extends to the New Wave and Pulp Fiction.'

On its release in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies riveted audiences with its uncompromising drama. Directed by Isao Takahata at Studio Ghibli and based on an autobiographical story by Akiyuki Nosaka, the story of two Japanese children struggling to survive in the dying days of the Second World War unfolds with a gritty realism unprecedented in animation. Grave of the Fireflies has since been hailed as a classic of both anime and war cinema. In 2018, USA Today ranked it the greatest animated film of all time. Yet Ghibli's sombre masterpiece remains little analysed outside Japan, even as its meaning is fiercely contested - Takahata himself lamented that few had grasped his message. In the first book-length study of the film in English, Alex Dudok de Wit explores its themes, visual devices and groundbreaking use of animation, as well as the political context in which it was made. Drawing on untranslated accounts by the film's crew, he also describes its troubled production, which almost spelt disaster for Takahata and his studio.

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

A visually stunning and heartfelt riposte to the emotional sterility of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Douglas Trumbull's eco-themed Silent Running (1972) became one of the defining science-fiction films of the seventies.

Widely believed to be Terry Gilliam's best film, Brazil's brilliantly imaginative vision of a retro-futuristic bureaucracy has had a lasting influence on genre cinema. Exploring its complex history and relationship with other dystopias, Paul McAuley explains why this satire on the unchecked power of the state is more relevant than ever.

Alien, that legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, was born out of a terrible monster movie script called Star Beast. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, this book explores how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings.

Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of "Pulp Fiction". He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

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.

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.

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.

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.