Études Cinématographiques

La Sociologie filmique propose une exploration des ressources intellectuelles offertes par l’hybridation de la sociologie et du cinéma : pratiquer la sociologie, ou d’autres sciences humaines, par l’image et le son. À l’ère de l’image, cet essai invite aux recherches sociologiques, non seulement par la maîtrise de la démarche de la discipline, mais aussi par l’apprentissage conjoint des techniques (prises de vues et de sons, dérushage, montage, etc.) et de l’écriture cinématographiques. La sociologie filmique participe ainsi à la reconnaissance du sensible et du point de vue situé, dans une discipline qui les a souvent tenus à l’écart.

Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) – Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema’s
pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work.

‘Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.’ New York Times ‘Best True Crime of 2022’

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England.

In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.

Le Prince’s family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis’s work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince’s own son was dead under suspicious circumstances – and modern Hollywood was being born.

This edition of Herzog on Herzog presents a completely new set of interviews in which Werner Herzog discusses his career from its very beginnings to his most recent productions.

Herzog was once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important director alive. Famous for his frequent collaborations with mercurial actor Klaus Kinski – including the epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the terrifying Nosferatu – and more recently with documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss, Herzog has built a body of work that is one of the most vital in post-war German cinema.

Over the past year the success of British films at international film festivals – as well as the numerous awards bestowed on 12 Years a Slave – have demonstrated that British cinema has undergone a genuine renaissance that has caused new voices to emerge. At the same time, directors whose work have enthralled over the past five years have also continued to develop and expand their visions.

John Boorman is one of the cinema’s authentic visionaries, drawn to myths and dreams. The undisputed heir to David Lean, his films, such as Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur, exhibit a continual search for the truth that only art can convey.

In Conclusions Boorman summarises what he has learned about the craft of film-making, and wishes to pass on to the next generation of film-makers. Into this tapestry of cinematic memories, he also weaves the story of his kith and kin, including the death of his cherished elder daughter, and an evocation of the forest of trees that he has planted as his final legacy.

A rare, intimate portrait of Hollywood’s reigning ‘blockbuster auteur’ whose deeply personal billion-dollar movies have established him as the most successful director to come out of the British Isles since Alfred Hitchcock.
More than just the tinkerings of a glass watchmaker, Christopher Nolan’s films have an unerring grasp of the way time makes us feel. Time steals people away in his films, and he takes careful note of the theft. Time is Nolan’s great antagonist, his lifelong nemesis. He seems almost to take it personally.

Based on the famous series of dialogues between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock from the 1960s, the book moves chronologically through Hitchcock’s films to discuss his career, techniques, and effects he achieved. It changed the way Hitchcock was perceived, as a popular director of suspense films – such as Psycho and The Birds – and revealed to moviegoers and critics, the depth of Hitchcock’s perception and his mastery of the art form.

As a result of the changed perceptions about Hitchcock, his masterpiece, Vertigo, hit the No 1 slot in Sight & Sound’s recent poll of film-makers and critics, displacing Citizen Kane as the Best Film of all time.

Documentary films are the rock and roll of our times. Why are they made? Who are in the tribe of documentary film-makers? Do their films really change the world?

Eighteen years ago, Nick Fraser created BBC Storyville, producing films that won Oscars, BAFTAs, and Peabody Awards. He found film-makers from all across the world covering important subjects in documentaries. In Say What Happened he describes the frenzied, intense world of documentary film-making, tracing its history back to the early pioneers, such as Dziga Vertov and his ground-breaking Man with a Movie Camera.

All drama takes the form of one of 36 situations. That was Georges Polti’s theory about theatre, which he put forward in his book 36 Dramatic Situations, published in French in the mid-19th century.

A century and a half later, Mike Figgis was struggling with a film treatment. He couldn’t get it right. But when he turned to Polti’s book, the sample situations helped clarify his ideas and broaden the landscape of his creativity.
He saw just how useful this sort of a framework could be for writers, and decided to rework Polti’s theory for a modern, film-focused audience.