It was at an Abel Gance retrospective in 1967 that Henri Langlois broke the news. Film historians had always considered Gance's "La Folie du Docteur Tube" (1915) a harbinger of Surrealism. But, Langlois explained, its extraordinary mess of distortion and hallucination was an accident. The opening
When artists come together in a spirit of union, they inevitably need a pulpit from which to expound their theories. For the Brits making films in the late '40s and early '50s, that pulpit was Sequence. Many filmmakers of the Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave found the pages of this journ
If Britain had a blacklist during the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he couldn't persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of the 1984 coal miners' strike was banned outright. Why? Loach
Most artists, at one time or another, fall out of public favor. But few have fallen so completely, so dramatically, and so fast from the zenith as Michael Powell. From its glory days of the '40s, his career saw a premature burial when British film fell in love with gritty realism in the '60s and '70s