|
Keeping up with the latest headlines, news and buzz
from leading buyers and sellers of stock footage
|
Ealing: Light and Dark
For the first time in a generation the BFI will present a major project celebrating the historic output of one of Britains best loved and most influential studios with a two month retrospective at BFI Southbank Ealing: Light and Dark from 22nd October to 30th December 2012. This is a chance to enjoy the great classics and comedies but also to discover the little known and unheralded more serious side of Ealing Studios during the 1940s and 50s, with its rich vein of challenging, provocative and sometimes subversive films, often surprisingly radical in their implications.
Ealing Studios has a unique place in the history of British cinema and it has become a byword for a certain type of British whimsy and eccentricity. But the studio's films boasted a surprising variety. Many of the films of Ealing rank among the undisputed classics of the period, among them Dead of Night, The Blue Lamp, The Cruel Sea, The Man in the White Suit and Passport to Pimlico. Above image is of Alec Guiness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
The project will include a national re-release of It Always Rains On Sunday (1947) and a new digital clean-up of the neglected They Came to a City, a major new book of essays Ealing Revisited, and special guests and events including an exhibition of Ealing posters, stills and memorabilia drawn from the BFI National Archives rich holdings and a new collection in the BFI Mediatheques. A parallel season celebrating director Alexander Mackendrick will feature all of his Ealing films from October 22 to November 30 at BFI Southbank.
The theme of Ealing: Light & Dark is a rich and revealing one. Even the renowned comedies have a dark side within them: Kind Hearts and Coronets is a wittily immoral tale of a serial killer in pursuit of a dukedom; Whisky Galore! has a mischievous approach to law and order as a Scottish island population attempt to beat the Customs men to the free whisky washed ashore from a shipwreck; in The Ladykillers a sweet old lady proves more than a match for a gang of brutal bank robbers.
Part of the enduring appeal of Ealing is its witty challenging of authority in films such as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, which touched a nerve with audiences eager for social and political change faced with the austerity of the immediate post-war era.
Beyond the apparent frothy entertainment, Ealing's darker side dares to show wartime failures, imagine the threat of invasion or to contemplate the unsavoury after-effects of the war in the subtly supernatural The Ship That Died of Shame or the European noir Cage of Gold, in which Jean Simmons is lured by the charms of an homme fatal. Another pan-European story, Secret People (featuring an early appearance for Audrey Hepburn), contemplates the ethics of assassination, while in Frieda, Mai Zetterling faces anti-German prejudice in a small English town.
There are treats for even the most thoroughgoing Ealing aficionados in our programme of the studio's barely known wartime propaganda shorts, many of them unseen and inaccessible for decades. BFI curators will tell the untold story of Ealing's short-lived documentary unit, overseen by the great Alberto Cavalcanti, and its importance to Ealing's feature films.
Ealing was presided over by Michael Balcon, a towering figure in British cinema who was an early supporter of Alfred Hitchcock. He gathered around him a band of talented collaborators including the very influential Cavalcanti and directors Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden and Alexander McKendrick. All of these remarkable filmmakers were born within a few years of each other, around 100 years ago.
Website: www.bfi.org.uk/southbank
|
|
|
|
|
|
Next >
|
|
 |
|
