Bøger i BFI Film Classics serien

Taylor Downing also discusses newly-available evidence on the background to the film's production that conclusively proves that the film was directly commissioned by Hitler and funded through Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, commissioned independently from the Nazi state by the Olympic authorities.

Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the film's release, John Coldstream's study of 'Victim' (1961) addresses the film's importance in the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality, the contribution of its stars Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms to its emotional impact, and the risk Bogarde took in taking on the central role.

The War of the Worlds was one of a handful of high-prestige science fiction productions in a low-budget era, and initiated modern cinema's reliance on screen-filling special effects. Barry Forshaw analyses and celebrates this key science fiction film of the 1950s, exploring its literary origins and numerous film progeny.

In this illuminating exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), Mark Bould considers Tarkovsky not as a transcendent artist but as a filmmaker working within a genre. He situates Solaris within the Russian and global cultures of the fantastic, to which Tarkovsky contributed three major science fiction films.

Kim Newman's fascinating study focuses on Roy Ward Baker's 1967 film, written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale for Hammer Films, but also looks at the origins of the Quatermass franchise in 1950s BBC serials and earlier films.

Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been hailed as a homage to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, although anyone tempted to take the film at face value should be warned that it aims to subvert as much as celebrate that genre.

Long considered an unpolished gem of film noir, the private treasure of film buffs, cinephiles and critics, Edgar G.

One of a cluster of extraordinary films to come out of post-war, post-Fascist Italy - loosely labelled 'neorealist' - Bicycle Thieves won an Oscar in 1949, topped the first Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time in 1952 and has been hugely influential throughout world cinema ever since.

Lawrence of Arabia is widely considered one of the ten greatest films ever made - though more often by film-goers and film-makers than by critics. This monograph argues that popular wisdom is correct, and that Lean's film is a unique blend of visionary image-making, narrative power, mythopoetic charm and psychological acuteness.

Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion is set during the First World War, but its themes of Franco-German conflict, divided loyalties in a time of war and the rise of anti-Semitism made it compelling and controversial viewing. Julian Jackson traces the film's historical context and its reception history.

This volume is a study of the classic western film "Rio Bravo", which, according to the author, remains "beyond politics, as an argument as to why we should all want to go on living".

There are no human babies in Bringing Up Baby, but there are those leopards and the relentless terrier George - and, as Peter Swaab explores in his witty and original study, Hawks's film wonders profoundly why we want animals in our lives and why we sometimes need to behave as animals ourselves.

Traces the history of The Shawshank Redemption, originally a low-key prison movie, from the pages of Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" to the screens on which it became a phenomenon, as well as exploring the near-religious fervour that the film inspires in its devoted fans.

Renoir's famous and controversial comedy of manners has a troubled history. Victor Perkins presents here a sensitive socio-historical study of Renoir's revised edition of the film, released 20 years after its premiere; shaped by the profundity and originality of its form.

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.

In this work, Edward Buscombe explores the ways in which 'Unforgiven', sticking surprisingly close to the original script by David Webb Peoples, moves between the requirements of the traditional Western, with its generic conventions of revenge and male bravado, and more modern sensitivities.

One of the first films to use a science-fiction premise as the basis for romantic comedy, it tells the story of a splenetic TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray at his disreputable best), who finds himself repeating indefinitely one drab day in the milk-and-cookies town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

Los Olvidados (1950) established Luis Bunuel's reputation as a world-class director. The film exhibits some of Bunuel's recognisable themes of love's yearnings, social injustice, and surrealism, but with a layer of compassion that sets it apart from many of his other films.

Ivan The Terrible (1944/46) was envisaged by its director, Sergei Eisenstein as a trilogy. The book attempts to follow the train of thought that connect the aesthetic construction and visual design of the film to Eisenstein's knowldege of iconography and painting, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Shakespeare and Balzac - and much more.

Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of "Pulp Fiction". He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

When it was released, "Dead Man" puzzled many audiences and critics. Here, the author argues that the film is both a quantum leap and a logical step in the director's career, and it's a film that speaks powerfully of contemporary concerns.

A quintessential work of 1960s European art cinema, "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad "("Last Year in Marienbad, "1961) was a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and 'New Novel" enfant terrible Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999 at his Hertfordshire home, having finished the editing of his last film. Looked at this way, Eyes Wide Shut reveals itself to be a deeply moving film about characters who are not so different from real people, a film about life in which questions of meaning and motive lose their value.

Jaws divides critics into those who dismiss it as infantile and sensational, and those who see the shark as freighted with political and psychosexual meaning. The author argues that both interpretations obscure the film's success as a work of art.

This is an examination of "The Night of the Hunter", Charles Laughton's only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model-T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

Richard Schickel traces in fascinating detail the genesis of the film: its literary origins in the crime fiction of the 1930s, the difficult relations between Wilder and his scriptwriter Raymond Chandler, the casting of a reluctant Fred MacMurray, the late decision to cut from the film the expensively shot final sequence of Neff's execution.

In "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), Ernest Lubitsch brought his legendary comic touch to the most unpromising situation: life in Nazi-occupied Poland. In this study, Peter Barnes considers what it is to make comedy out of tragedy.