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

Essays— Apr 13, 2018
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

Essays— Apr 20, 2015
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

Essays— Mar 27, 2012
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

Essays— Feb 22, 2011
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

Essays— Nov 9, 2010
Before the Rain: Never-Ending Story

Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved.

By Ian Christie

Essays— Jun 24, 2008
The Lion Has Wings: The Lion Triumphant

As Britain stood on the threshold of a long-dreaded war in 1939, Alexander Korda decided to show what cinema could do to rally the nation and win support around the world.

By Ian Christie

Essays— May 27, 2008
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

Nov 22, 2005
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

Essays— Jun 4, 2002
The Ruling Class

Peter Medak’s stinging satire is unashamedly theatrical, emerging from a fascinating period in English culture when theatre and cinema together were mining a rich vein of flamboyant self-analysis.

By Ian Christie

Essays— Oct 30, 2001
I Know Where I’m Going!

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.

By Ian Christie

Essays— Feb 20, 2001
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

Essays— May 25, 1999