A Matter of Life and Death

by Ian Christie

Overview

Illustrated
A dazzling fantasy produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is one of the greatest achievements of co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death the film is a haunting meditation on love, grief and the legacy of war, made vivid by remarkable colour photography and set design (including the famous 'stairway to heaven'). Ian Christie, one of the foremost scholars of Powell and Pressburger looks in detail at the making of the film as well as locating it in the broadest traditions of British art.

Author Biography: Professor Ian Christie of Birkbeck College, London is the author of Arrows of Desire (1994) and most recently the editor of Gilliam on Gilliam (Faber 1999).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838714215
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/25/2019
Series:	BFI Film Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Ian Christie is a film historian, curator, broadcaster and consultant, and is the Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He has written and edited books on early film, Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam and worked on exhibitions ranging from Film as Film (Hayward Gallery,1979), Eisenstein: His Life and Art (MoMA Oxford, 1988) and Twilight of the Tsars (Hayward Gallery, 1991) to Spellbound: Art and Film (Hayward, 1996) and Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006). He is a regular contributor to radio and television programmes on cinema for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and BBC2 and BBC4.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Beginnings
2. Production
3. Responses
Epilogue: Afterlife
Notes
Credits