Ten and a bit years ago I contributed for the first time to the venerable Sight and Sound once-every-ten-years poll of the greatest films. The poll has been running since 1952. The top choice of the sixty-three critics who contributed was Ladri di biciclette, or Bicycle Thieves (Italy 1948). From 1962 to 2002 the poll-topperRead More
To the cinema to see a film about cinema. Is there any art form, any medium, that has been quite so sentimental about itself as cinema? There is nostalgia in the understanding of every art form or medium which has transformed through time, but cinema’s forlornness seems particular to itself. It is summed up byRead More
Nine years ago I started up a website that gathered examples of eyewitness testimony from people going to see motion pictures. I called it Picturegoing, which felt catchy, and the dot com address was available. Today, I am happy to announce, the book version has been published. The book is entitled Picturegoers – because aRead More
In a time of conflict, sing the songs of the other side. I watched Solaris again the other night – the 1972 Soviet film, not its pale American remake. At the time of the crass, blind adventurism of the invasion of Ukraine, I felt the need to experience the finest of Russian culture. The filmRead More
Plant a pip, and you hope that it will grow. It will, in time, establish roots and shoot upwards, growing in depth while it reaches up to the light. It is how all stories must work. We begin at a point that is presented to us as the beginning, but which we soon learn isRead More
Have you seen the pterodactyls in Citizen Kane? They are there, supposedly, in the background of the beach picnic scene towards the end of the film. As the camera tracks through the party guests, following Kane’s butler Raymond (played by Paul Stewart), just before we enter the Kanes’ tent, there in the background are silhouettesRead More
It’s curious how a fine work of art immediately catches the eye. You walk through a gallery, and there is that picture at the far end whose ideal resolution of form and feeling stops all else except its contemplation. You pick up a book at random and on opening at any page a phrase isRead More
Back in my time working as a cataloguer at what was then called the National Film Archive, then the National Film and Television Archive, and is now the BFI National Archive, we used to produce shotlists for some of the films in the collection. They weren’t, strictly speaking, shotlists, since we cataloguers seldom described theRead More
It was on again the other night. In these days of DVD and streaming services it can seem hard to think of the film that is difficult to find – as films once were, aside from current releases, when you had to search long and far before tracking down that rarity of which you hadRead More
I find this photograph fascinating. Not for the man with the motion picture camera that looks like some form of primitive machine gun, not for the late Victorian gentlemen oozing privilege to the tip of their top hats, but the man on the far left. He is half in, half out of the picture, lookingRead More