The Bend It Like Beckham director has done it again. In a gesture that makes Indian cinema's heart swell with pride, her iconic film about a girl who is determined to play football in the UK, has been selected as one of the films with a stamp being issued in its honour in the 'Great British Film Special Stamp Issue'. The other globally-celebrated films which have also been issued as stamps along with Gurinder's films by the British government are A Matter Of Life & Death (1946), Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Chariots Of Fire (1981), Secrets & Lies (1996), A Colour Box (1935), The Night Mail (1936), Love On The Wing (1938), Spare Time (1939). To have a film by an Indian director being selected for such a singular honour alongside such British classics, is a matter of great pride for India and its motley group of filmmakers who have made a global impact. When contacted...
- 5/26/2014
- BollywoodHungama
The Royal Mail today launched a new series of stamps celebrating some of the best of British cinema. Featuring key scenes from these much-loved classics, six of them are available in postcard sized collectors' editions, as follows:-
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Chariots of Fire (1981)
Secrets & Lies (1996)
Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
"We are delighted to present this celebration of our home-grown film industry, which features six classic British films that have enjoyed global success in the post-war era," said the Royal Mail on its webste.
A miniatures sheet depicting scenes from four acclaimed 1930s documentaries is also available, with stills from the following films:-
Night Mail
Love on the Wing
A Colour Box
Spare Time
Since 1995, the Us has been celebrating one iconic film star on a stamp each year. This year it is featuring Charlton Heston....
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Chariots of Fire (1981)
Secrets & Lies (1996)
Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
"We are delighted to present this celebration of our home-grown film industry, which features six classic British films that have enjoyed global success in the post-war era," said the Royal Mail on its webste.
A miniatures sheet depicting scenes from four acclaimed 1930s documentaries is also available, with stills from the following films:-
Night Mail
Love on the Wing
A Colour Box
Spare Time
Since 1995, the Us has been celebrating one iconic film star on a stamp each year. This year it is featuring Charlton Heston....
- 5/12/2014
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Forum, London
Embracing retro-futurism, this instrumental three-piece's flashes back to the 80s with its nostalgic, slightly over-the-top sampling
What an oddity Public Service Broadcasting are: the trio (Mr B controlling visuals, Wrigglesworth on drums, J Willgoose Esq on stringed instruments and electronics) look like fans straight from a Doctor Who convention; and their music is entirely instrumental, the only voices coming from samples of public information and propaganda films. Yet they've filled the Forum on the back of a debut album that reached a respectable No 21 in the charts.
That oddness is also rather safe. There is nothing unnerving about the dialogue they sample, or the films showing on big screens at the back of the stage. In fact, this is a vision of retro-futurism in which Niall Ferguson might feel at home. While PBS claims they are trying to "teach the lessons of the past through the music of...
Embracing retro-futurism, this instrumental three-piece's flashes back to the 80s with its nostalgic, slightly over-the-top sampling
What an oddity Public Service Broadcasting are: the trio (Mr B controlling visuals, Wrigglesworth on drums, J Willgoose Esq on stringed instruments and electronics) look like fans straight from a Doctor Who convention; and their music is entirely instrumental, the only voices coming from samples of public information and propaganda films. Yet they've filled the Forum on the back of a debut album that reached a respectable No 21 in the charts.
That oddness is also rather safe. There is nothing unnerving about the dialogue they sample, or the films showing on big screens at the back of the stage. In fact, this is a vision of retro-futurism in which Niall Ferguson might feel at home. While PBS claims they are trying to "teach the lessons of the past through the music of...
- 11/22/2013
- by Michael Hann
- The Guardian - Film News
Without superheroes or aliens, the F&F franchise has made speed, laced with rage, one of film's most beloved intoxicants
The reason for the burgeoning success of the Fast & Furious films eludes some people. This apparently humdrum franchise manages without superheroes, intergalactic conflict, aliens, zombies, vampires or 3D. What has it got? Perhaps the clue's in the title. Speed and rage have come to form an alluring combination.
Speed, said Aldous Huxley, "provides the one genuinely modern pleasure." Until the 1820s, no one had travelled faster than a galloping horse; by the 1840s, trains were zipping along at 70mph. Speed began to redefine human life, as the acceleration of output yielded previously unimaginable benefits. The Gpo documentary Night Mail, with its pulsing pistons, captured the exaltation this engendered. But if the hastening tempo of the railway age brought collective liberation, it imposed a new tyranny on the individual.
As Marxists put it,...
The reason for the burgeoning success of the Fast & Furious films eludes some people. This apparently humdrum franchise manages without superheroes, intergalactic conflict, aliens, zombies, vampires or 3D. What has it got? Perhaps the clue's in the title. Speed and rage have come to form an alluring combination.
Speed, said Aldous Huxley, "provides the one genuinely modern pleasure." Until the 1820s, no one had travelled faster than a galloping horse; by the 1840s, trains were zipping along at 70mph. Speed began to redefine human life, as the acceleration of output yielded previously unimaginable benefits. The Gpo documentary Night Mail, with its pulsing pistons, captured the exaltation this engendered. But if the hastening tempo of the railway age brought collective liberation, it imposed a new tyranny on the individual.
As Marxists put it,...
- 5/20/2013
- by David Cox
- The Guardian - Film News
Concluding a three-part series on cinema's most flamboyant production designers.
Marcel L'Herbier arguably confused great design with great filmmaking, but he did deliver consistently on the former. And some of the time, influenced by and in rivalry with Abel Gance, he produced the latter.
Years before the moderne/streamline/art deco style conquered Hollywood, L'Herbier was featuring minimalist art nouveau decor and Bauhaus architecture in his French productions. In L'inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman, 1924) he has the services of Alberto Cavalcanti as production designer.
Cavalcanti's career took not only design, but experimental sound editing (Night Mail, 1936), and the production, writing and direction of both documentaries and dramas (Dead of Night, Went the Day Well?) in France, Britain and his native Brazil. And everything he did was touched with genius.
In L'inhumaine, his work is supplemented by the art of Fernand Leger (cubist-tubist-mechanist) and the costumes of future director Claude Autant-Lara.
Marcel L'Herbier arguably confused great design with great filmmaking, but he did deliver consistently on the former. And some of the time, influenced by and in rivalry with Abel Gance, he produced the latter.
Years before the moderne/streamline/art deco style conquered Hollywood, L'Herbier was featuring minimalist art nouveau decor and Bauhaus architecture in his French productions. In L'inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman, 1924) he has the services of Alberto Cavalcanti as production designer.
Cavalcanti's career took not only design, but experimental sound editing (Night Mail, 1936), and the production, writing and direction of both documentaries and dramas (Dead of Night, Went the Day Well?) in France, Britain and his native Brazil. And everything he did was touched with genius.
In L'inhumaine, his work is supplemented by the art of Fernand Leger (cubist-tubist-mechanist) and the costumes of future director Claude Autant-Lara.
- 3/14/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Len Lye's deliriously jazzy 1930s animation for the Post Office Savings Bank shows public information films needn't be dull
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
The colours might look late-60s-psychedelic; some of the interaction between graphics and the human figure (at approx 1.40, for example) seems comparable with the experiments made by contemporary digital artists such as Klaus Obermaier. But this short animation, Rainbow Dance, was actually created back in 1936 as an advert for the Post Office Savings Bank. Between 1933 and 1940 the Gpo (now the Royal Mail) ran a film unit which produced dozens of short public-information films. The most famous was Night Mail with music by Benjamin Britten and words by Wh Auden, but while that was a classic black-and-white vision of Britain, avant-garde mainly in its combination of music and poetry, Len Lye's Rainbow Dance was one of several extravagantly experimental animations on which...
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
The colours might look late-60s-psychedelic; some of the interaction between graphics and the human figure (at approx 1.40, for example) seems comparable with the experiments made by contemporary digital artists such as Klaus Obermaier. But this short animation, Rainbow Dance, was actually created back in 1936 as an advert for the Post Office Savings Bank. Between 1933 and 1940 the Gpo (now the Royal Mail) ran a film unit which produced dozens of short public-information films. The most famous was Night Mail with music by Benjamin Britten and words by Wh Auden, but while that was a classic black-and-white vision of Britain, avant-garde mainly in its combination of music and poetry, Len Lye's Rainbow Dance was one of several extravagantly experimental animations on which...
- 11/30/2012
- by Judith Mackrell
- The Guardian - Film News
This December, Mubi will be presenting a small Tony Scott retrospective in New York at 92YTribeca. See below for the films, dates and notes. All movies will be shown on film.
***
American cinema lost one of its great, unsung, emigre directors when Tony Scott mysteriously took his life earlier this August. A pioneer in the commercial advertisement aesthetic of the 80s, Scott would take that aesthetic and build upon it, transferring it to a post-9/11 world with hyperfast cutting and camerawork that would eventually come to define the decade and the director. Gina Telaroli and I, working with 92YTribeca's Cristina Cacioppo, have assembled a program featuring one key film from each of Scott's three American periods. To draw out some of the best and overlooked qualities of his small but aesthetically and thematically coherent oeuvre, we're also accompanying each film with a short from the avant-garde, and completed the package...
***
American cinema lost one of its great, unsung, emigre directors when Tony Scott mysteriously took his life earlier this August. A pioneer in the commercial advertisement aesthetic of the 80s, Scott would take that aesthetic and build upon it, transferring it to a post-9/11 world with hyperfast cutting and camerawork that would eventually come to define the decade and the director. Gina Telaroli and I, working with 92YTribeca's Cristina Cacioppo, have assembled a program featuring one key film from each of Scott's three American periods. To draw out some of the best and overlooked qualities of his small but aesthetically and thematically coherent oeuvre, we're also accompanying each film with a short from the avant-garde, and completed the package...
- 11/19/2012
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Documentaries made by the Post Office in the 1930s to highlight social issues heralded a new style of film-making
Pioneering documentary films made by the Post Office in the 1930s may look stilted and wooden now but they were actually the prototypes of a new type of film-making, a study co-authored by a Cambridge academic claims.
The short films, shown in cinemas before the main feature from the early 1930s onwards, were self-conscious advertising by the Gpo. But their makers, led by the great documentary director John Grierson, also sought to show contemporary British life and believed that they should have a "socially useful purpose", inspired by Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein.
The unit's best-known film is Night Mail, made in 1936, showing the overnight express carrying the post from London to Edinburgh. It is part-scripted by Wh Auden with the famous refrain: "This is the night mail crossing the...
Pioneering documentary films made by the Post Office in the 1930s may look stilted and wooden now but they were actually the prototypes of a new type of film-making, a study co-authored by a Cambridge academic claims.
The short films, shown in cinemas before the main feature from the early 1930s onwards, were self-conscious advertising by the Gpo. But their makers, led by the great documentary director John Grierson, also sought to show contemporary British life and believed that they should have a "socially useful purpose", inspired by Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein.
The unit's best-known film is Night Mail, made in 1936, showing the overnight express carrying the post from London to Edinburgh. It is part-scripted by Wh Auden with the famous refrain: "This is the night mail crossing the...
- 11/10/2011
- by Stephen Bates
- The Guardian - Film News
(John Ford, 1924, PG, Eureka!; Victor Turin, 1929, U, BFI)
The first movie to find universal popularity was 1903's 12-minute western The Great Train Robbery. But the silent era's two great railway movie epics were The Iron Horse and Turksib, made by directors born in the 1890s from very different backgrounds. The Irish-American John Ford's masterly if occasionally creaky The Iron Horse lasts 150 minutes and is a mammoth undertaking about the building of the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869. A carefully researched, exciting fictional film, it made Ford famous and is now on DVD with a commentary and new musical score.
A middle-class Russian, Victor Turin was educated in the States (MIT), learnt the movie business at the Vitagraph, became a western fan and returned to the Soviet Union to direct the great 78-minute documentary Turksib – about the heroic transformative building of the railway linking Turkestan to Siberia. Like The Iron Horse,...
The first movie to find universal popularity was 1903's 12-minute western The Great Train Robbery. But the silent era's two great railway movie epics were The Iron Horse and Turksib, made by directors born in the 1890s from very different backgrounds. The Irish-American John Ford's masterly if occasionally creaky The Iron Horse lasts 150 minutes and is a mammoth undertaking about the building of the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869. A carefully researched, exciting fictional film, it made Ford famous and is now on DVD with a commentary and new musical score.
A middle-class Russian, Victor Turin was educated in the States (MIT), learnt the movie business at the Vitagraph, became a western fan and returned to the Soviet Union to direct the great 78-minute documentary Turksib – about the heroic transformative building of the railway linking Turkestan to Siberia. Like The Iron Horse,...
- 10/22/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when it was founded as part of the National Film Act of 1939. Indeed, the first Nfb commissioner was none other than John Grierson, the great Scottish producer and a father of modern documentary. (Today, it seems that the Usps could use a little love in the vein of the immortal Night Mail,...
- 9/8/2011
- by Livia Bloom
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Film director whose work included the wartime masterpiece Western Approaches
The director Pat Jackson, who has died aged 95, was best known for the semi-documentary war film Western Approaches (1944). This neglected classic – a feature-length portrait of the Battle of the Atlantic – was shot under the auspices of the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit and predominantly filmed at sea under hazardous conditions. The shoot's logistical nightmares were compounded by the vast size of the Technicolor camera. Jackson himself devised the story of the imminent convergence of a German U-boat and an English ship which is on the way to save a group of comrades in a lifeboat.
Jackson was in his late 20s when he shot Western Approaches with the outstanding cameraman Jack Cardiff and a cast of amateur actors. It was a remarkable achievement that remained unsurpassed throughout the writer-director's lengthy career. The film was well received in Britain and...
The director Pat Jackson, who has died aged 95, was best known for the semi-documentary war film Western Approaches (1944). This neglected classic – a feature-length portrait of the Battle of the Atlantic – was shot under the auspices of the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit and predominantly filmed at sea under hazardous conditions. The shoot's logistical nightmares were compounded by the vast size of the Technicolor camera. Jackson himself devised the story of the imminent convergence of a German U-boat and an English ship which is on the way to save a group of comrades in a lifeboat.
Jackson was in his late 20s when he shot Western Approaches with the outstanding cameraman Jack Cardiff and a cast of amateur actors. It was a remarkable achievement that remained unsurpassed throughout the writer-director's lengthy career. The film was well received in Britain and...
- 7/12/2011
- by Brian Baxter
- The Guardian - Film News
He was behind the Ealing films and made a handful of the most polished, imaginative and enjoyable movies of the 1940s. It's time the name of Alberto Cavalcanti was better known, argues Kevin Jackson
'Directed by Cavalcanti" runs the last of the black-and-white title credits. Back in the 1940s, the ordinary chap in the Odeon's ninepenny stalls is baffled, even annoyed. Who on earth is this jumped-up foreigner, thinking he's so bloody famous that he doesn't need a first name? (In fact, Cavalcanti was widely seen as one of the most self-effacing, charming men ever to have worked in film.) And why is a bloody Eyetie in charge of a British film – let alone an Ealing film, the most British productions of all? (In fact, Cavalcanti was Brazilian.) But those in the audience who had noticed the unusual credit once or twice before settled deeper into their red plush seats,...
'Directed by Cavalcanti" runs the last of the black-and-white title credits. Back in the 1940s, the ordinary chap in the Odeon's ninepenny stalls is baffled, even annoyed. Who on earth is this jumped-up foreigner, thinking he's so bloody famous that he doesn't need a first name? (In fact, Cavalcanti was widely seen as one of the most self-effacing, charming men ever to have worked in film.) And why is a bloody Eyetie in charge of a British film – let alone an Ealing film, the most British productions of all? (In fact, Cavalcanti was Brazilian.) But those in the audience who had noticed the unusual credit once or twice before settled deeper into their red plush seats,...
- 7/2/2010
- by Kevin Jackson
- The Guardian - Film News
(1955-59, PG/U/PG, Optimum)
Michael Balcon, the film-maker synonymous with Ealing Studios and its special ethos, produced 95 films for the studio between 1938 and 1959, a good number of them classics. Optimum has brought out the vast majority and these three are part of a mopping-up operation. The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), the last picture under the Ealing banner, is a fairly good thriller directed by former documentarist Harry Watt (who made Night Mail and Ealing's first Australian picture, The Overlanders) and stars American tough guy Aldo Ray as an escaped convict taking over an island in Sydney Harbour and holding the city to ransom.
The Man in the Sky (1957) is a stiff-upper-lip, victory-in-defeat tale starring Jack Hawkins as an aircraft designer desperately trying to save his ailing company.
The best film is The Night My Number Came Up (1955), a tale of the occult in the style of Ealing's Dead of Night...
Michael Balcon, the film-maker synonymous with Ealing Studios and its special ethos, produced 95 films for the studio between 1938 and 1959, a good number of them classics. Optimum has brought out the vast majority and these three are part of a mopping-up operation. The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), the last picture under the Ealing banner, is a fairly good thriller directed by former documentarist Harry Watt (who made Night Mail and Ealing's first Australian picture, The Overlanders) and stars American tough guy Aldo Ray as an escaped convict taking over an island in Sydney Harbour and holding the city to ransom.
The Man in the Sky (1957) is a stiff-upper-lip, victory-in-defeat tale starring Jack Hawkins as an aircraft designer desperately trying to save his ailing company.
The best film is The Night My Number Came Up (1955), a tale of the occult in the style of Ealing's Dead of Night...
- 4/3/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
1943/45, PG/U, Optimum
Having released DVDs of all the familiar Ealing titles, Optimum is now bringing out largely forgotten ones like this pair that resulted from Ealing boss Michael Balcon hiring documentary film-makers during the Second World War to bring a new realism to the studio's output.
Nine Men, the feature debut of documentarist Harry Watt, director of Night Mail (1936), is a morale-raising propaganda entertainment set in North Africa but shot on a Welsh beach. Character actor Jack Lambert, then serving as an army officer, plays a tough training sergeant inspiring a platoon of recruits by recalling how nine gallant soldiers (a regional cross-section including Ealing stalwart Gordon Jackson) held off a numerically superior Italian force in the Libyan desert.
Charles Crichton's semi-documentary Painted Boats is a quieter affair, both realistic and lyrical, about life on England's canals and a romance between a boy and a girl from rival barge families.
Having released DVDs of all the familiar Ealing titles, Optimum is now bringing out largely forgotten ones like this pair that resulted from Ealing boss Michael Balcon hiring documentary film-makers during the Second World War to bring a new realism to the studio's output.
Nine Men, the feature debut of documentarist Harry Watt, director of Night Mail (1936), is a morale-raising propaganda entertainment set in North Africa but shot on a Welsh beach. Character actor Jack Lambert, then serving as an army officer, plays a tough training sergeant inspiring a platoon of recruits by recalling how nine gallant soldiers (a regional cross-section including Ealing stalwart Gordon Jackson) held off a numerically superior Italian force in the Libyan desert.
Charles Crichton's semi-documentary Painted Boats is a quieter affair, both realistic and lyrical, about life on England's canals and a romance between a boy and a girl from rival barge families.
- 1/10/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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