The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

by A. L. Kennedy
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

by A. L. Kennedy

Paperback

$15.95 
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Overview

Winston Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and tried to have it banned when it was released in 1943. But Martin Scorsese, a champion of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, considers it a masterpiece. It's a film about desires repressed in favour of worthless and unsatisfying ideals. And it's a film about how England dreamt of itself as a nation and how this dream disguised inadequacy and brutality in the clothes of honour. A. L. Kennedy, writing as a Scot, is fascinated by the nationalism which The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp explores. She finds human worth in the film and the pathos of stifled emotions and unfulfilled lives. 'If he is unaware of his passions, ' she writes of Clive Candy, the film's central figure, 'this is because his pains have become habitual, a part of personality, and because he was never taught a language that could speak of emotions like pain.'.
This edition includes a foreword by the author exploring the film's continuing relevance in an age of Brexit, when English and British national identity are deeply contested concepts.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781838719104
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 05/28/2020
Series: BFI Film Classics
Pages: 88
Product dimensions: 5.66(w) x 8.11(h) x 0.15(d)

About the Author

A.L.Kennedy was born in Dundee. She lived for almost 30 years in Glasgow and now stays in North Essex. She has won a variety of UK and international book awards, including a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, The Heinrich Heine Preis, the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rees Prize. She has twice been included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. Her recent books includeThe Blue Book (2011); Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse (2015); Serious Sweet (2016) and The Little Snake (2018). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Akademie der Kunst. She also writes for the stage, screen, TV and has created an extensive body of radio work including documentaries, monologues, dramas and essays. She also performs occasionally in one person shows and as a stand up comic.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 6

Foreword to the 2020 Edition 7

Soho and Home 11

A Love of Flags 21

Manifesto 38

The Matter of Life and Death 50

The Enemy Alien 58

Looking for Lermontov 74

Notes 82

Credits 83

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