Cinema’s original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises.
‘Discoverability’ is an important new criterion amid the vast range of works now readily available. Will this new democracy of taste mark the end of traditional canons, and what are the implications for preservation and education?
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.
