Professor Ian Christie

Birkbeck tel no: 0207 631 6196

Ian Christie joined the Department of History of Art and Screen Media in Autumn 1999, as Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History, having previously been Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent (1997-9) and Visiting Lecturer in Film at Oxford University (1995-8). Earlier, he worked at the British Film Institute from 1976-96 in various capacities, as head of Distribution, Exhibition, Video Publishing and, finally, Special Projects. This last involved co-producing a television series on early cinema for BBC2, The Last Machine presented by Terry Gilliam (1995); and co-curating an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Spellbound: Art and Film (1996), which included work by Gilliam, Greenaway and two subsequent Turner Prize winners, Douglas Gordon and Steve McQueen. He advised on the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World at the V&A in 2006 and in the same year was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University. Director of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, with its headquarters at Birkbeck, from 2003-05, he also directed its London Project (see Centre website for further details) and is currently director of the London Screen Study Collection, housed in Birkbeck's new Centre for Film and Visual Media Research.

Recent lectures and conference papers have been on representing dreams, the English school of production design, Dali and Surrealist Cinema, Bluebeard's Castle and total cinema; early cinema in London (linked to a touring exhibition Moving Pictures Come to London: 1894-1914), the impact of digital exhibition; reverse narrative in cinema; the career of Michael Powell; trick films by Robert Paul and Georges Melies (Sheffield); Malevich and Eisenstein; the 1905 Russian revolution on film (St Andrews); Sokurov and contemporary Russian cinema; animation and the unconscious.

Ian co-founded in 1999 (with Michael Grant) the international review Film Studies, which is published twice yearly by Manchester University Press. He is Vice President of Europa Cinemas, an EU funded organisation which supports exhibitors throughout Europe who show European films, and a Trustee of the Independent Film Parliament. He is also a regular reviewer and broadcaster on film matters.

Current research interests

The long history of screen entertainment in London; London's' local' film history. Early cinema and related media - photography, music, sound, radio, optical devices. Artists' films, videos and digital work from the earliest period to the present. British cinema and television - various aspects, including Powell and Pressburger, and other (still) neglected figures and periods. Russian cinema, from the pre-Soviet period, to the current post-Soviet phase. The digital revolution.

Areas of supervision

Early cinema and 'intermedial' history; film and the visual arts; avant-garde film and video; British, Russian, European and American film history.

Selected publications

Books

A Matter of Life and Death (BFI Film Classics, 2000)

Gilliam on Gilliam (Faber, 1999)

The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (BBC/BFI, 1994).

Arrows of Desire: the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 2nd edn (Faber, 1994; first edition, 1985)

Edited books and journals

The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Filmmaker, co-edited with Andrew Moor (British Film Institute, 2005), to mark the centenary of Powell's birth

Law's Moving Image, co-edited with L. Moran, E. Lozidou, E. Sandon (Cavendish, 2004).

Scorsese on Scorsese, co-edited with D. Thompson, 3rd edn. (Faber, 2003).

Spellbound: Art and Film, co-edited with P. Dodd (South Bank Centre, 1996).

The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, co-edited with R. Taylor, 2nd edn. (Routledge, 1994; first edition, 1988)

Eisenstein Rediscovered, co-edited with Richard Taylor (Routledge, 1993).

Chapters in books

'Toys, Instruments, Machines: Why the Hardware Matters', Multimedia Histories: from the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons, John Plunkett (Exeter, 2007)

'What Counts as Art in England: Pevsner and the Minor Canons', Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. Peter Draper (Ashgate, 2004).

'Buñuel against "Buñuel": Revisiting the landscape of fanaticism in "La Voie Lactée"', Luis Buñuel: New Readings, eds. P. Evans and I. Santoialla (British Film Institute, 2004).

'Asynchrony', Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001, eds. L. Sider, D. Freeman (Wallflower, 2003).

'As others see us: British filmmaking and Europe in the 90s', British Cinema of the 90s, ed. R. Murphy (BFI, 2000).

'Mirror image: French reflections of British cinema', La Lettre de la Maison Française d'Oxford, no. 11 (Trinity-Michaelmas, 1999).

'Celluloid Apocalypse', The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, ed. F. Carey (British Museum, 1999).

'Motives for Metaphor', Boyd Webb, retrospective catalogue (Auckland Art Gallery, 1997).

Review articles

Rachael Low, The History of British Film (7 vols.), review article in Journal of Popular British Cinema, no. 2, (1999).

'Returning to zero', Sight and Sound (April 1998). On Aleksandr Sokurov.

'Has the cinema a career? the origins of British resistance to film', Times Literary Supplement (17 November 1995).

Media reviews and broadcasting

Recent television: Interviews for the BBC4 series on Albert Kahn, 'Alcohol and Cinema', 'Fathers and Sons', BBC2 series 'Summer of British Cinema', 'Silent Britain'. Martin Scorsese Profile for BBC4; Derek Jarman introductions for Artsworld channel.

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