Each volume in the "BFI Film Classics" series features a brief production history, detailed filmography, notes and bibliography. This text explores the influence of modern art and design in William Cameron Menzie's 1930s vision of the future, "Things to Come".

This text looks at one of the masterpieces of French cinema, made under great difficulties during the German occupation in World War II, and set in the world of nineteenth-century Parisian theatre.

This intimate book draws extensively on research in the archives of Francois Truffaut's company, Les Films du Carrosse, and on interviews with many of La Nuit americaine's cast and crew. They bear witness to Truffaut's passion for film.

The starting point for Dusan Makavejev's film 'WR: Mysteries of the Organism' is Wilhelm Reich, the Marxist psychoanalyst who preached sexual enlightenment as a gateway to a better society. Juxtaposing hippie America and cold war Yugoslavia, it's a film which speaks urgently to the contemporary world. In the BFI MODERN CLASSICS series.

This text looks at Kenji Mizoguchi's film Sansho Dayu, a version of a famous Japanese folk-tale about an eleventth century feudal official forced into exile by his political enemies. In his absence, his children fall under the corrupting influence of the malevolent Sansho.

In this book, Richard Taylor asks to what extent the film can lay claim to "authentic" history. He then examines October 's relationship to the politics of the period and explains the theory and its application, as well as placing October in the wider context of Eisenstein's career.

Bringing to a close his "Marseille" trilogy, Cesar was one of Marcel Pagnol's most significant projects. This text reviews the questions that Pagnol posed in the film, looking at how he reflected the contemporary and artistic culture of the city, around which the trilogy was based.

In Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) schemes and murders his way to a dukedom. This title looks into the turbulent personalities that formed the complex style of this film to unravel the fusion of cynicism, contempt, sparkling wit and philosophical curiosity.

In January 1993 sectarian rioting left two thousand Hindus and Muslims dead in Bombay. Only two years later Mani Ratnam's audacious Tamil film Bombay (1995) used these events as a backdrop to a love story between a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl. Bombay was condemned by Muslim critics for misrepresentation and was embroiled in censorship controversies. These served only to heighten interest and the film ran to packed houses in India and abroad. Lalitha Gopolan shows how Bombay struggles to find a narrative that can reconcile communal differences. She looks in detail at the way official censors tried to change the film under the influence of powerful figures in both the Muslim and the Hindu communities. In going on to analyze the aesthetics of Bombay, she shows how themes of social and gender difference are rendered through performance, choreography, song and cinematography. This is a fascinating account of a landmark in recent Indian cinema.

Set in "a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles", Terence Davies' film "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. This study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style.

Andrew Pulver’s study of Night and the City argues that it is one of the most important noir films ever made. Drawing from biographies, journals and interviews, Pulver traces the film’s development and production history and its reception by British and American critics, considering the film both as an example of British film noir—which was heavily influenced by the constricting social mores of the interwar years and the shattering effects of WWII—and also as a hybrid of contrasting American and European noir traditions. Finally, Pulver explores the film’s representations of the dark underworld of London’s Soho, at once the city’s entertainment area, but also containing a subterranean life of criminality, prostitution and menace, and reflects upon its contribution to a long history of mythologising of this ever-shifting urban landscape.

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 epic Shoah—its title is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”—is the distillation of more than 350 hours of film gathered over 11 years. It tells the story of the Holocaust through interviews with the survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. In 2000, the Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm called it “one of the most remarkable films ever made.” It has also provoked debates about the very possibility of Holocaust representation. Sue Vice provides a devoted study of the film, discussing the problematic role of Lanzmann as the director and the numerous controversies and conclusions that Shoah has produced. Some of the topics she covers are: Lanzmann as filmmaker, mise-en-scène, Lanzmann as interviewer, the ethics of filming, testimony, and more.

Amy Sargeant's illuminating study of Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) provides a detailed discussion of the film's production and reception history, as well as a textual analysis that focuses on Harold Pinter's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novella; the film's use of architecture and interior design to establish character and relationships. Richly illustrated with images from the film as well as fine art to which the film refers this book will appeal to fans of the film, of Losey, of Bogarde and of the Film Classics series

Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966–9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema' movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree's insightful study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about the film.

An American in Paris (1951) was a landmark film in the careers of Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. A joyous celebration of George Gershwin's music, French art, the beauty of dance and the fabled City of Light, the film was heralded as a rare example of entertainment 'for mass and class alike'. Choreographed by Kelly at the height of his career, it gave new stature to the Hollywood musical, and showcased as never before the artistic ambition, technical skills, creative imagination and collaborative ethos of MGM's pioneering Arthur Freed Unit. Sue Harris draws on archival material to trace the film's development from conception to screen. Offering new insights into the design process in particular, she shows how An American in Paris established the cinematic template for a city with which Hollywood would become increasingly infatuated in the decades to follow.

When Head-On ( Gegen die Wand, 2004) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was hailed as a turning point for German cinema. Not only was this unconventional love story the first German film in eighteen years to win the prestigious award, but the success of writer-director Fatih Akin was also celebrated as the revival of German auteur cinema. Meanwhile Turkey claimed Akin as its own prodigal son and his film a victory for Turkish cinema. Daniela Berghahn provides a detailed and entertaining account of the film's artistic inspirations, its production history and the debates that surrounded it in the German and Turkish press. Arguing that much of the media discourse on Turkish German identity politics detracted from Akin's remarkable artistic achievement, Berghahn instead situates Head-On in the critical contexts of global art cinema and transnational melodrama. This comparative approach excavates new layers of meaning and offers highly original insights into Akin's landmark film.

The first computer-generated animated feature film, Toy Story (1995) sustains a dynamic vitality that proved instantly appealing to audiences of all ages. Like the great Pop Artists, Pixar Studios affirmed the energy of modern commercial popular culture and, in doing so, created a distinctive alternative to the usual Disney formula. Tom Kemper traces the film's genesis, production history and reception to demonstrate how its postmodern mishmash of pop culture icons and references represented a fascinating departure from Disney's fine arts style and fairytale naturalism. By foregrounding the way in which Toy Story flipped the conventional relationship between films and their ancillary merchandising by taking consumer products as its very subject, Kemper provides an illuminating, revisionist exploration of this groundbreaking classic.

From Here to Eternity (1953) is one of the most controversial films of its time. Adapted from James Jones' bestselling novel, the landmark blockbuster deals frankly with adultery, military corruption, physical abuse, racism and murder, and traces the unhappy lives of five American outsiders in the last days before Pearl Harbor. Made at the height of the Cold War and Hollywood's anticommunist purges, director Fred Zinnemann, writer Daniel Taradash and producer Buddy Adler defied military and industry pressure to censor the material. Exploring the film's full production history and drawing upon archival documents and rare interviews with cast and crew, J. E. Smyth provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the film many industry insiders thought couldn't be made. This special edition features original cover artwork by Eda Akaltun.

As popular as the 1957 Boris Pasternak novel it is based on, Doctor Zhivago (1965) has meant many things to different audiences. It can be seen as the epitome of modern romantic fiction, a chronicle of disillusion with the Russian Revolution, and above all a monument, heroic or outdated depending on taste, to the heyday of the movie blockbuster. This aspect was proclaimed by the original MGM poster featuring the stars, Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, dwarfing the historical events that surround them. In this illuminating study of the film's production history, Ian Christie explores how it finally came about, largely in Spain, including recent revelations about the CIA's involvement in the novel's publication, and places particular emphasis on the contribution of production designer John Box to its spectacular and deeply evocative imagery. Tracing the film's reception across fifty years, Christie shows how it has had an enduring influence on film, music, fashion and popular culture. This special edition features original cover artwork by Michał Janowski.

Directed by the actor/filmmaker Ida Lupino, The Bigamist (1953) is the story of Harry Graham, a salesman travelling between two towns and two wives. In its portrayal of Harry’s "double life," the film takes on a double life of its own, hovering as it does between two genres. Telling the story through Harry’s voice-over, yet eschewing the iconic character of the femme fatale, Lupino’s film reveals and recasts film noir as male melodrama par excellence. In its rendering of this emotionally paralysed man, able only to reveal the truth of his duplicity to us, the film audience, The Bigamist is a fascinating study of the post-War male. A collaborative affair, The Bigamist was written and produced by Lupino’s ex-husband Collier Young and co-starred his current wife, Joan Fontaine, as bride number one. The last of six films that Lupino directed for the independent production company that she co-founded, The Filmakers, it was notably the only film of its period with a woman director who also played a starring role. Amelie Hastie explores the film in the context of independent Hollywood, at a time when the studio system was beginning to dissolve, and as a commentary on the fraught institution of marriage. She also considers The Bigamist in relation to Lupino’s personal and professional history. Lupino was one of only two women members of the Directors’ Guild of America in the classical Hollywood era, and The Bigamist, Hastie argues, reveals multiple traces of Lupino’s experiences of working as both director and actress in the movie business.

Cathy is the perfect ‘50s housewife, living the perfect ‘50s life: with healthy kids, a successful husband, and social prominence. Then one night she surprises her husband Frank, as he is kissing another man, and her tidy world starts spinning out of control. In her confusion and grief, she finds consolation in the friendship of their African-American gardener, Raymond—a socially taboo relationship that leads to the further disintegration of life as she knew it. Despite Cathy and Frank’s struggle to keep their marriage afloat, the reality of his homosexuality and her feelings for Raymond open a painful, if more honest, chapter in their lives.

Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia is one of the most controversial films ever made. Capitalizing on the success of Triumph of the Will, her propaganda film for the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl secured Hitler's approval for her grandiose plans to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The result was a work as notorious for its politics as celebrated for its aesthetic power. Taylor Downing provides an indispensable guide to this major work of film documentary. He gives the full story of how Riefenstahl negotiated relative independence from the Nazi authorities by pitting Hitler against Goebbels, the propaganda minister, who wanted complete control. Downing also gives a filmmaker's insights into the logistical and technical problems thrown up by managing a production which employed nearly forty cameramen to shoot 400,000 metres of film. He concludes that though its political effect was to glorify Nazi achievements, the film undeniably set the standard for Olympic filmmaking for the next five decades.

Murray Pomerance offers an illuminating account of one of Hitchcock's most intruiging and successful films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day. Through a close reading of the film alongside analysis of its complex production history, Pomerance's analysis highlights its darkest nuances, and its themes of musicality, gendered power, and cultural strangeness. He proposes that, far from being a merely charming escapade, the film tells a strange story of doubling, spiritual presence, and the intricacies of social organisation.

Ground-breaking in its departure from its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally (1989) established classic romantic comedy themes and tropes still being employed today. Placing the film in its historical, social and generic contexts, Tamar Jeffers-McDonald explores how writer Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner used structure, filmic devices, music and classic romcom concepts in innovative new ways. In her fresh and timely appraisal of this definitive, much-loved classic, Jeffers-McDonald reflects on the film's enduring legacy and influence on popular culture to give readers a wider perspective on the continuing evolution and importance of the romcom genre.

The award-winning film Dont Look Back (1967) captures Bob Dylan on tour and on the cusp of change in 1965. Dylan was rapidly shedding his image as a folk musician and being reborn as a rock persona – and D. A. Pennebaker was there to record this fascinating transformation. This insightful book charts the ways in which Pennebaker revised aspects of observational 'direct cinema', a style of film-making that he helped to pioneer, in order to represent in innovative ways Dylan's onstage performances and backstage actions. Keith Beattie's perceptive and nuanced analysis explains the relationship between 'pose' and the performative presentation of 'persona', which forms the basis of the film's portrayal, and explores Pennebaker's relationship with Dylan in the film-making process. In doing so, the book highlights many remarkable moments from Dont Look Back and demonstrates how this landmark film eschewed the informationalism of the documentary form, revealing a captivating portrait of its beguiling subject.

Written on the Wind (1956) is one of classical Hollywood's most striking films and ranks among Douglas Sirk's finest achievements. An intense melodrama about an alcoholic playboy who marries the woman his best friend secretly loves, the film is highly stylised, psychologically complex, and marked by Sirk's characteristic charting of the social realities of 1950s America. This first single study of Written on the Wind reassesses the film's artistic heritage and place within the wider framework of contemporary American culture. Incorporating original archival research, Peter William Evans examines the production, promotion and reception of Written on the Wind, exploring its themes – of time, memory, space, family, class and sex – as well as its brilliance of form. Its vivid aesthetics, powerful performances and profound treatment of human emotions, make Written on the Wind a masterpiece of Hollywood melodrama.

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate in philosophy, faces an uncertain professional future, while Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an established celebrity, questions his choices at midlife. Both are distant - emotionally and spatially - from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film's poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation 's structuring device of her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure. She details the complexities of filming (a 27-day shoot with no permits in Tokyo), explores Coppola's allusions to fine art, subtle colour palette and use of music over words, and examines the characters' experiences of the Park Hyatt Tokyo and excursions outside, together and alone. She also re-evaluates the film in relation to Coppola's other features, as the product of an established director with a distinctive cinematic 'Coppolism'. Fundamentally, Ferriss argues that Lost in Translation is not only a cinema classic, but classic Coppola too.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians and family members. The meetings remind us that the modern gangster's success is built upon inside information and on strategic planning. Michael and his father Vito's days resemble those of the legitimate businessmen they aspire or pretend to be. Jon Lewis' study of Coppola's masterpiece provides a close analysis of the film and a discussion of its cinematic and political contexts. It is structured in three “The Sequel,” “The Dissolve,” and “The Sicilian Thing” – accommodating three avenues of inquiry, the film's importance in and to Hollywood history, its unique, auteur style and form; and its cultural significance. Of interest, then, is New Hollywood history, mise-en-scene, and a view of the Corleone saga as a cautionary capitalist parable, as a metaphor of the corruption of American power, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time. Its teenage protagonists Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna went on to be major stars of global cinema. Yet on its release the film was vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and ' Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses with playful seriousness such major issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment. Smith suggests Y Tu Mamá También remains an example for world cinema of how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an ephemeral teen movie.

Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking. Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.

Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations. Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skillful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many, extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman – Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony Richardson and his company, Woodfall, it was one of the first films to be made entirely on location, and was shot in an innovative, rough, poetic style by cinematographer Walter Lassally. It was also the launchpad for a new type of young female star in Rita Tushingham. Tushingham plays the young heroine, Jo, who finds she is pregnant after her love affair with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a Black sailor. When Jimmy's ship sails away, Jo is comforted and supported by her gay friend Geoff (Murray Melvin), while her unreliable mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), has her own life to lead. Candid in its treatment of matters of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and motherhood, and highly distinctive in its evocation of place and landscape, A Taste of Honey marked the advent of new possibilities for the telling of working-class stories in British cinema. As such, its rich but complex legacy endures to this day.

A surreal and darkly humorous vision, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s. Claire Henry's study of the film takes us into its netherworld, providing a detailed account of its production history, its exhibition and reception, and its elusive meanings. Using original archival research, she traces how Lynch took his nightmare of Philadelphia to the City of Dreams, infusing his LA-shot film with the industrial cityscapes and sounds of the Callowhill district. Henry then engages with Eraserhead's irresistible inscrutability and advances a fresh interpretation, reframing auteurism to centre Lynch's creative processes as a visual artist and Transcendental Meditation practitioner. Finally, she outlines how Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things' became a model midnight movie and later grew in reputation and influence across broader film culture. From the opening chapter on Eraserhead's famous 'baby' to the final chapter on the film's tentacular influence, Henry's compelling and authoritative account offers illuminating new perspectives on the making and meaning of the film and its legacy. Through an in-depth analysis of the film's rich mise en scène, cinematography, sound and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms the film's significance as Lynch's first feature, but also advances a wider case for appreciating its status as a film classic.