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Christophe dupin3/28/2023 ![]() ![]() It’s a long way from the Keystone Kops.’ Since I’m personally more inclined to associate film as an art form with the Keystone Kops than with the highly uneven, sporadic, and often misinformed coverage it can count on getting in the TLS – which would be far less likely to hand out its assignments relating to opera and theatre to amateur scholars on those subjects – I’m not entirely sure what kind of status is cause for celebration here. But even so, his way of charting that progress all the way up to October 2010, which is when his Foreword is dated, strikes me as rather odd: “If you want proof that film has really arrived, look at that bastion of academe the Times Literary Supplement and see how it now gives more space in its arts pages to film than it does to opera and theatre. According to Forman – director of the BFI from 1949 to 1955, who was recommended for the post by John Grierson, his boss at the Films Division of the Central Office of Information, and whose first major step, according to Nowell-Smith, “was the revitalization of Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin” – he’d never even heard of the BFI when Grierson first told him about his recommendation, adding that “the rise in status of the BFI” since then “is the rise in the status of film itself”. The BFI has always been an organization that has to service and speak to many different positions about what cinema is, why it exists, and whether as well as how it deserves some sort of state support. (And, just for the record and the sake of full disclosure, I’m mentioned in the Acknowledgements and appear in a photograph of a picket line during a 1974 BFI strike, taken during my first month on the job.) The portions I have in mind, apart from the book’s Foreword (by Sir Denis Forman) and Introduction (by Nowell-Smith and Dupin) are Chapters 9 (‘The 1970s,’ 152-178), 10 (‘The Smith Years,’ 179-196), and 13 (‘The Sight and Sound Story, 1932-1992,’ 237-251), all three by Nowell-Smith. So I hope I can be forgiven for focusing here on just a few selected portions where I feel I’m more that casually acquainted with the subject matter, with the hopes that others can chime in with comments on the other parts on other occasions. But my qualifications for evaluating such a comprehensive history are limited, apart from having once been a short-term employee. This is a pity, because it’s the sort of book that should be more widely available to more than the university libraries that can still afford it. (By contrast, my hardcover copy of Ivan Butler’s long out-of-print and much sketchier – albeit useful – 208-page “ To encourage the art of the film”: The Story of the British Film Institute, which includes a comparable number of illustrations, carries a price of only £2.30 on its flyleaf.) ![]() ![]() meant that the only reasonable way I could acquire it was to ask to review it. This is what sparked my particular interest in this impressively detailed history, coedited and mostly written (apart from four of its 15 chapters) by the University of London’s Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and the International Federation of Film Archives’ Christophe Dupin after more than six years of research – and the fact that it retails for $95 at Amazon in the U.S. The most interesting job I’ve ever had was my two and a half years of working for the British Film Institute, between 19 – as both assistant editor of the Monthly Film Bulletin (under Richard Combs) and staff writer for Sight and Sound (under Penelope Houston, who was directly responsible for my getting hired), occasioning at the time a move from Paris to London. (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books/Warriewood) Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2012 The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933-2000 ![]() Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin (ed.) ![]()
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