Peter Bradford, who has died aged 99, was a documentarist who made more than 100 films in a 40-year career – mostly designed to explain, teach, advocate and promote – for government departments, quangos, charities and companies.
Born in Bradford Abbas, Dorset, Peter was the son of Job Bradford, an accountant, and his wife, May (nee Tremellen). He attended Bryanston school – where he recalled an inspirational visit by the documentarist Basil Wright – followed by the photography course at the Bauhaus-influenced Reimann School of Art in London.
Born in Bradford Abbas, Dorset, Peter was the son of Job Bradford, an accountant, and his wife, May (nee Tremellen). He attended Bryanston school – where he recalled an inspirational visit by the documentarist Basil Wright – followed by the photography course at the Bauhaus-influenced Reimann School of Art in London.
- 10/10/2019
- by Tim Boon
- The Guardian - Film News
She was the first woman to head an A-list festival.
Erika de Hadeln, the first woman to head up an A-category film festival, has died at the age of 77 after a long illness.
She founded the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival (now known as Visions du Réel) in Switzerland with her Swiss husband Moritz in 1969. de Hadeln oversaw the festival organisation and programmed the selection with her husband who served as director of the festival until 1979. de Hadeln took over at the helm in 1981 to 1993.
It was during these 25 years in Nyon she worked with many leading documentary filmmakers such as Joris Ivens,...
Erika de Hadeln, the first woman to head up an A-category film festival, has died at the age of 77 after a long illness.
She founded the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival (now known as Visions du Réel) in Switzerland with her Swiss husband Moritz in 1969. de Hadeln oversaw the festival organisation and programmed the selection with her husband who served as director of the festival until 1979. de Hadeln took over at the helm in 1981 to 1993.
It was during these 25 years in Nyon she worked with many leading documentary filmmakers such as Joris Ivens,...
- 12/20/2018
- by Martin Blaney
- ScreenDaily
A True Original: Alberto Cavalcanti is showing from September 9 – October 12, 2018 in the United States.Champagne CharlieIf Dickensian fiction story of Nicholas Nickleby were to be filmed today, he’d be a young man incessantly searching Craigslist and wondering what college education is really good for. At least that’s the impression one gets watching Alberto Cavalcanti’s lively adaptation, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), which perfectly captures the angst of urban youth fitted with stellar education and plenty desire for work, but dire economic prospects—an apt topic both today and at a time when Cavalcanti made his British fiction films, during and immediately after the Second World War.In his native Brazil, Cavalcanti has been celebrated for his avant-garde modernist films, including his debut, Nothing But Time (1926), and his collaboration with Walter Ruttman on Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), which serves as an important reference in the...
- 9/18/2018
- MUBI
When the Austin Film Festival first launched 25 years ago, it planted its flag as a place that celebrates the craft of screenwriting. Now every October top screenwriters gather in Austin to talk about and celebrate the art of writing for the big and small screens. Seven years ago, Aff branched out to capture these screenwriting discussions with the “On Story Project,” which they share with the public for free through various formats: a PBS-distributed TV series, a Pri-distributed radio show, a podcast, a book, and an archive hosted at the Wittliff Collections.
In honor of Aff having launched its first ever crowdfunding campaign, dedicated to support the growing On Story Project (which ends today!), IndieWire has collected quotes from some our favorite filmmakers and screenwriters about how they get through the difficulties of writing. Each of these quotes are from in-depth conversation available to download in podcast form.
In honor of Aff having launched its first ever crowdfunding campaign, dedicated to support the growing On Story Project (which ends today!), IndieWire has collected quotes from some our favorite filmmakers and screenwriters about how they get through the difficulties of writing. Each of these quotes are from in-depth conversation available to download in podcast form.
- 5/10/2018
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Edgar Jones Feb 2, 2018
Professor Edgar Jones writes for us on the portrayal in cinema of post-traumatic stress disorder...
War has served as an enduring theme for the commercial cinema, not least because of the dramatic opportunities it offers for warrior characters. However, since the Vietnam War significant attention has been directed to the ways in which trauma can change people film and cause lasting psychological harm. Both The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) showed veterans struggling to cope with their wartime experiences. Such movies tapped into growing popular and professional concern about the long-term impact of combat on soldiers’ minds.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally adopted the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (Ptsd) based on clinical evidence largely derived from veterans of the Vietnam conflict. Filmmakers were increasingly drawn to the theme of psychological breakdown as a way of interpreting the war and Ptsd...
Professor Edgar Jones writes for us on the portrayal in cinema of post-traumatic stress disorder...
War has served as an enduring theme for the commercial cinema, not least because of the dramatic opportunities it offers for warrior characters. However, since the Vietnam War significant attention has been directed to the ways in which trauma can change people film and cause lasting psychological harm. Both The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) showed veterans struggling to cope with their wartime experiences. Such movies tapped into growing popular and professional concern about the long-term impact of combat on soldiers’ minds.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally adopted the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (Ptsd) based on clinical evidence largely derived from veterans of the Vietnam conflict. Filmmakers were increasingly drawn to the theme of psychological breakdown as a way of interpreting the war and Ptsd...
- 2/1/2018
- Den of Geek
For years the essay film has been a neglected form, but now its unorthodox approach to constructing reality is winning over a younger, tech-savvy crowd
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.
Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...
- 8/3/2013
- by Sukhdev Sandhu
- The Guardian - Film News
A red letter day. There's a new Senses of Cinema out and it opens with the first part of Daniel Fairfax's interview with Jean-Louis Comolli, who edited Cahiers du cinéma from 1965 to 1973. Senses editor Rolando Caputo: "At the time, Cahiers was undergoing its so-called 'Marxist-Leninist' phase, with a heavy overlay of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory." And Slavoj Žižek would have been in his late teens, early 20s. At any rate: "Put simply, at stake was the demystification of the 'cinematic apparatus' to demonstrate how ideology was both embedded within the technology of cinema and an effect of its representational modes."
Fairfax: "Having steadily made films over the last 40 years — including the magisterial series on the French electoral machine, Marseille contre Marseille (1996) — Comolli has also pursued a prolonged theoretical pre-occupation with the cinema, which, in various ways, is profoundly defined by his earlier participation in Cahiers. Refreshingly, he has never sought to repudiate his radical past,...
Fairfax: "Having steadily made films over the last 40 years — including the magisterial series on the French electoral machine, Marseille contre Marseille (1996) — Comolli has also pursued a prolonged theoretical pre-occupation with the cinema, which, in various ways, is profoundly defined by his earlier participation in Cahiers. Refreshingly, he has never sought to repudiate his radical past,...
- 3/20/2012
- MUBI
Italian film director celebrated for his insightful short films
The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.
De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance...
The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.
De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance...
- 12/12/2011
- by John Francis Lane
- The Guardian - Film News
"One of the major works of Jean-Luc Godard, the eight-part essay film Histoire(s) du Cinéma has revealed itself slowly over a period of more than 30 years, as a sort of intellectual striptease." In the New York Times, Dave Kehr traces the histories of the making, reception and distribution of Histoire(s), which sees a release this week on two discs from Olive Films. For Kehr, Histoire(s) "is a sort of associational machine, as dense and obscure as any of the Symbolist poetry that also serves as one of Mr Godard's reference points, but one that also solicits the viewer's participation in connecting the dots and filling in the blanks." The work is also "a tragic account of the 20th century: a century of staggering atrocities, which the aesthetic glories of the motion picture medium (or any other art form) were unable to prevent, and may, in Mr Godard's view,...
- 12/4/2011
- MUBI
Director who found success across film, TV and advertising
Paul Dickson, who has died aged 91, had a long, versatile and award-winning career in film, television and advertising. His critical reputation rests on two remarkable postwar documentaries, The Undefeated (1950) and David (1951, the Welsh contribution to the Festival of Britain). Episodes of The Avengers (1968) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969 were among his best-known television credits.
Dickson first attracted notice with The Undefeated, a film about the difficulties faced by injured wartime combatants who were patients at rehabilitation centres in Roehampton, Stoke Mandeville and elsewhere, as they adjusted to life in the postwar world. A calculated but moving attempt to destigmatise state help for disabled people, the film quickly became a critical success after opening at the Edinburgh film festival. A recruitment drive for the Korean war appeared to curtail its wider circulation, but it was awarded best documentary by the British...
Paul Dickson, who has died aged 91, had a long, versatile and award-winning career in film, television and advertising. His critical reputation rests on two remarkable postwar documentaries, The Undefeated (1950) and David (1951, the Welsh contribution to the Festival of Britain). Episodes of The Avengers (1968) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969 were among his best-known television credits.
Dickson first attracted notice with The Undefeated, a film about the difficulties faced by injured wartime combatants who were patients at rehabilitation centres in Roehampton, Stoke Mandeville and elsewhere, as they adjusted to life in the postwar world. A calculated but moving attempt to destigmatise state help for disabled people, the film quickly became a critical success after opening at the Edinburgh film festival. A recruitment drive for the Korean war appeared to curtail its wider circulation, but it was awarded best documentary by the British...
- 11/9/2011
- by Scott Anthony
- The Guardian - Film News
Philip French speaks to Ridley Scott, Ken Russell, Gurinder Chadha, Shane Meadows and Stephen Frears about their debut pictures and detects the styles of the then-fledgling auteurs
Do artists discover a personal style and develop their themes gradually or are these to be found in embryonic form in their earliest works? There's no easy answer to this dual question. Take, for example, Ken Russell's Amelia and the Angel (1957), Ridley Scott's Boy and Bicycle (1965), Stephen Frears's The Burning (1967), Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But… (1989) and Shane Meadows's Where's the Money, Ronnie? (1995). All were made on shoestring budgets and each lasts less than half an hour.
First, presented with the directors' names and the credits concealed, would you be able to match up film and film-maker? I think most moviegoers could, which suggests there is something in these first movies that we would now recognise as characteristic. Second,...
Do artists discover a personal style and develop their themes gradually or are these to be found in embryonic form in their earliest works? There's no easy answer to this dual question. Take, for example, Ken Russell's Amelia and the Angel (1957), Ridley Scott's Boy and Bicycle (1965), Stephen Frears's The Burning (1967), Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But… (1989) and Shane Meadows's Where's the Money, Ronnie? (1995). All were made on shoestring budgets and each lasts less than half an hour.
First, presented with the directors' names and the credits concealed, would you be able to match up film and film-maker? I think most moviegoers could, which suggests there is something in these first movies that we would now recognise as characteristic. Second,...
- 9/25/2010
- by Philip French
- 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
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