For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound.
Before the next such poll, due in 2022, this lecture considers what factors have made certain films and their makers ‘classic’; and why the fifty-year reign of Citizen Kane was ended in 2012 by Hitchcock’s eerie melodrama Vertigo.
The related screening at Cine Lumiere has been cancelled in response to COVID-19 national restrictions.
Professor Christie is former Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media at Gresham College. He is a renowned British film scholar and currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy.
He has researched and published on many aspects of film history, including Eisenstein and Russian cinema, Powell and Pressburger, Gilliam and Scorsese, and is a regular broadcaster on cinema.
He has also worked on many exhibitions, including Spellbound (Hayward, 1996), Modernism (V&A, 2006) and Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017).
His exhibition, Animatograph!, will be at London Metropolitan Archives during September-October 2019, and his monograph Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago University Press) will appear later this year.
Professor Christie's lecture series are as follows:
2020/21 Exploding the Film Canon
2019/20 The Worlds of Powell and Pressburger
2018/19 Screening London
2017/18 Living Through a Media Revolution
All lectures by the Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media can be accessed here.
