Author Spotlight

Ian Christie

Ian Christie is a film historian, curator, broadcaster, and professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited many books on Russian, British, and American cinema—including Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Inside the Film Factory (coedited with Richard Taylor), and Scorsese on Scorsese (coedited with David Thompson)—and has written about and provided commentaries for Powell and Pressburger films and other titles for the Criterion Collection. His 2019–20 Gresham College lectures on Powell and Pressburger are available online.

12 Results
The Color of Pomegranates: Parajanov Unbound

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.


By Ian Christie

The River: A New Authenticity
"Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditati…

By Ian Christie

When Noël Met David . . .
Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they were the key creative figures in…

By Ian Christie

Fish Tank: An England Story

Andrea Arnold shows a tremendous empathy toward her downtrodden characters in this portrait of a teenage girl on the cusp of womanhood.

By Ian Christie

All Those Things That Are to Die: Antichrist
To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes in 19…

By Ian Christie

Before the Rain: Never-Ending Story

Before the Rain brought a vision of “Balkan conflict” to the world that caused a sensation in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and an Academy Award nomination. Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia, w

By Ian Christie

The Lion Has Wings: The Lion Triumphant

Britain’s heraldic coat of arms features two creatures, a lion and a unicorn, which have often been taken to symbolize the qualities of strength and imagination. As Britain stood on the threshold of a long-dreaded war in 1939, Alexander Korda decid

By Ian Christie

The Tales of Hoffmann: Tales from the Lives of Marionettes
Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the longtime collaborator…

By Ian Christie

The Horse’s Mouth

By any standard, The Horse’s Mouth shines as an outstandingly personal work from a decade that often seems the most arid in British cinema.

By Ian Christie

The Ruling Class

The Ruling Class may not be recognized as a neglected masterpiece—at least, not yet. But if we remember how long it took for Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and Renoir’s Rules of the Game to be recognized as supreme anatomies of social uneas

By Ian Christie

I Know Where I’m Going!

I Know Where I’m Going! is a love story that is also a fable. Joan Webster thinks she knows exactly where she’s going: to marry the richest industrialist in Britain. But when the elements stop her from reaching a remote Scottish island where the

By Ian Christie

The Red Shoes
Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most obviously i…

By Ian Christie