Film Nitrate

"You laugh at my big belly but you don't know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache but you don't know why I grew it!" The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp   was the first true classic that came out of the fruitful partnership of Michael Powell, who took up directing responsibilities, and Emeric Pressburger who wrote and produced the film. After cutting their teeth on war-films such as   The Spy in Black   (1939) and  46th Parallel   (1941) by 1943 they were keen to take on something more substantial than a typical World War II British propaganda film. Here they managed to fit in two world wars, the Boer War, and along the way called into question the generals whose dated tactics had caused Britain to become embroiled in so much devastation, as well as demonstrate just how outdated and ultimately futile the English gentlemen's code of conduct was. Unsurprisingly, Winston Churchill was furious at the film's barely-concealed message, but looking back on it n...

By 1937 French filmmaker Jean Renoir was 43 years old and had made 21 films (a number of which were short films), going right back to the halcyon silent days of 1924. Despite moderate success in his homeland with films such as La Chienne (1931) and Toni (1935), his name was still virtually unknown outside of France. In 1937 all that changed with the release of La Grande Illusion , winning the director numerous accolades, including the distinction of being the first foreign film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. As the years have gone on its reputation has only grown and it is now widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, and has been the subject of countless articles, reviews and books. The film is set during the First World War (then still known as the Great War), and begins when two French aviators, Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) are shot down and captured by the respected German aviator Captain v...

Because of the revolution in sound films that started with the first synchronised sound recording on T he Jazz Singer (1927), silent films over the next couple of years quickly became an endangered species. By 1930 virtually every film in the Western world was embracing sound, and silent films had soon gone from being a medium developed after three decades of experimentation culminating in some of the best cinema ever made, to being almost extinct. Due to the insistence of film studios that every picture was now to be made using sound (though some could later have intertitles added and turned into silents for foreign distribution), for the first and only time in its history cinema took a large step backwards. Suddenly filmmakers who had great confidence in their ability were finding themselves in an alien environment. All of the crew now had to be quiet on set or the background noise would be picked up by the primitive microphones. Sound also meant that clunky camera rigs of the ti...