Anthony Asquith

Anthony Asquith (9 November 1902 –20 February 1968) was a leading English film director.

Born in London, he was the son of H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the First World War, and Margot Asquith who was responsible for 'Puffin' as his family nickname.^[1] He was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford.

The film industry was viewed as disreputable when Asquith was young, and according to the actor Jonathan Cecil, a family friend, Asquith entered his profession in order to escape his background.^[2] At the end of the 1920s he began his career with the direction of four silent films which established his reputation.^[1] Pygmalion (1938) was based on the George Bernard Shaw play featuring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. He was a longtime friend and colleague of Terence Rattigan, they collaborated on ten films, and producer Anatole de Grunwald. His later films included Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951), and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).

Cecil Hepworth

A Day in the Hayfields (1904)

Hepworth invented a type of arc lamp for Robert Paul in 1895, assisted Birt Acres in the following year, and in 1897 wrote the first book on the cinema, "Animated Photography, The ABC of the Cinematograph" in 1897. In the early days of cinema, he worked on the periphery of the industry, assisting Birt Acres in a royal command cinematograph performance. After being sacked by Charles Urban from Maguire and Baucus, Hepworth and his cousin Monty Wicks set up their own company, Hepworth and Co, with their trade logo Hepwix, which lasted until about 1908.

His film-making career began when he set up a laboratory in Hurst Grove, Walton on Thames in 1896 (or 1899, according to some accounts), and converted the small house into a studio. Twenty-five years later it would be the over-ambitious expansion of the studio that would drive him out of business. What happened during the intervening years was an immense achievement.

By 1900 he was releasing a hundred films a year. In 1899 he made a film of aspects of the Boer War, which survives. Their first popular success came with the filming of the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, which bankrolled the company and permitted further development.

He was primarily a producer more than an actual film-maker but did on occasion, write, direct, edit, photograph and star in many films. Hepworth was instrumental in developing the British film industry through his use of cutting to produce a coherent film narrative.

It was always in the back of my mind from teh very beginning that I was to make English pictures, with all the English countryside for background and with the English atmosphere and the English idioms throughout.

The picorialist movement

The pictorialist movement in photography is one that contributed great success at the beginning of the 20th century. It gave birth to present and modern day photography. It led the path to great symbolic art in both photography and literary art.

The year is after 1855 until 1910. The camera is everywhere. George Kodak made the camera available even to the middle class.

Norman Mac Laren

Norman McLaren (11 avril 1914, Stirling, Royaume-Uni - 26 janvier 1987, Montréal, Canada) est un réalisateur canadien d'origine britannique. Il est considéré comme un des grands maîtres du cinéma d'animation mondial. Son nom est étroitement associé à l'Office national du film du Canada.

Œuvre

Compagnon de vie du directeur de la section française de l'ONF, Guy Glover, son œuvre s'est développée au sein du bouillonnement culturel et politique du cinéma québécois d'alors. Certains de ses films se feront d'ailleurs en français.

Il a expérimenté de nombreuses techniques : grattage de pellicule, peinture sur pellicule, et même peinture du son sur pellicule, pixilation, prise de vue réelle, stop motion, dessin animé.

Norman McLaren s'est notamment inspiré des techniques de superposition de personnage sur un décor d'Emile Courtet, dans ses techniques de grattage de pellicule, comme dans Love on the Wing par exemple.

D'une créativité débordante, McLaren expérimente constamment, à la manière de l'artiste visuel dans son studio. Il utilise les mêmes images de départ dans ses 2 films Lignes horizontales et Lignes verticales.

Il innove également dans la création du son, dessinant directement la piste sonore optique de ses films. Il se crée un système de repères, établissant des correspondances entre espaces des traits et notes de musiques, auquel il ajoute des masques afin de créer des ondes sonores simples ou plus complexes. On voit son travail à ce niveau dans À la Pointe de la Plume. Mais ce travail sur le son va plus loin: Mc Laren a toujours recherché une symbiose entre son et image. L'image danse sur la musique de la bande sonore. On peut dire que McLaren a dessiné pour nous aider à entendre et composé de la musique pour nous aider à voir. L'œil voit ce que l'oreille entend et réciproquement. Ainsi, en définitive, l'œil entend, l'oreille voit. Ceci est d'ailleurs le titre d'un film de McLaren dans lequel il réalise, à partir d'un piano, non seulement le son du film mais aussi l'image.

Il travaillait au sein de l'Office national du film du Canada.

Ici on retient Pas de deux, qui découpe le mouvement de deux danseurs

et A Phantasy qui présente un décor surréaliste digne de Dalì

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Friedrich Wilhelm "F. W." Murnau (December 28, 1888 – March 11, 1931) was one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era, and a prominent figure in the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s. Although some of Murnau's films have been lost, most still survive. He was a member of the Gainsborough company.

German films

Murnau's most famous film is Nosferatu, a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula for which Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. Murnau lost the lawsuit and all prints of the film were ordered to be destroyed, but bootleg prints survived. The vampire, played by German stage actor Max Schreck, resembled a rat which was known to carry the plague. The origins of the word are from Stoker's novel, where it is used by the Romanian townsfolk to refer to Count Dracula and presumably, other undead.

Nearly as important as Nosferatu in Murnau's filmography was The Last Laugh ("Der Letzte Mann", German "The Last Man") (1924), written by Carl Mayer (a very prominent figure of the Kammerspiel film movement) and starring Emil Jannings. The film introduced the subjective point of view camera, where the camera "sees" from the eyes of a character and uses visual style to convey a character's psychological state. It also anticipated the cinéma vérité movement in its subject matter. The film also utilized the "Unchained Camera Technique", a mix of tracking shots, pans, tilts, and zooms. Also, unlike the majority of Murnau's other works, The Last Laugh is technically considered a Kammerspiel film rather than expressionist. Unlike expressionist films, Kammerspiel films are categorized by their chamber play influence, involving a lack of intricate set designs and story lines / themes regarding social injustice towards the working classes.

Murnau's last German film was the big budget Faust (1926) with Gösta Ekman as the title character, Emil Jannings as Mephisto and Camilla Horn as Gretchen. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic version. The film is well-known for a sequence in which the giant, winged figure of Mephisto hovers over a town sowing the seeds of plague.

Nosferatu (1922 - music by Hans Erdmann) and Faust – eine deutsche Volkssage (1926 - music by Werner Richard Heymann) were two of the first films to feature original film scores.

From free cinema to the British New wave.

The silent Period: 1895-1929

pioneers
early british films
quality of the fillms
the setting
criticism
the American competition
the Gainsbourough films
Hitchcock and G
Hitchcock without G
Anthony Asquith
German influence
New film societies in London
The Quota Act 1927

The early sound period: 1930-1939

first sound film
A new way to make a film
1930's tensions
the average picture show (newsreels)
production basis
some stars
Alexander Korda
Korda's revelation star
Rank's revelation film director
documentary movement
first doc on herring fishing
Battleship Potemkin
Grierson's revelation stars
Propaganda vs art
National interest in cinema
The "avant-gardist" cinema
Film tracts

The war years: 1940-1945

The war years leading to national awareness
Some productions of the period
patriotic feelings
Humphrey Jennings of the documentary school

Case study: Fires were started
story= period of the Blitz
location
novelties

The postwar years: 1945-1951

Productive postwar years+ influence of British cinema
New policies (sort of protectionism)
classics' adaptation
political thrillers
the Archers Company
political allegories with comedies
Ealing studies=> new genres developped
The basis of these comedies
Another genre: social problem films

Case study: Brief encounter (1946)
woman's films
social observation
an object of art
comic relief