Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 278: Sat Oct 5

A Midnight Masterclass in Film with Colin MacCabe: Gate Notting Hill, 11pm


This looks fascinating. A masterclass in film in the 'How To' season with Colin McCabe.

Here is the cinema's introduction, more details of which you can find here: A midnight masterclass on some of the greatest moments in world cinema, explaining in close-up what makes each clip so perfect. The shot, the cut, the grammar of film: this unique take on the finest of all modern entertainments will be essential viewing.


Film is the greatest of contemporary arts and, even in the digital age, our most popular source of entertainment. Since the end of the First World War it has provided our most important fictions, about individuals and society, as well as faithfully documenting our times: no previous era has been so multifarious; no previous era has been recorded as it was being lived. This evening class will help you to understand better this unprecedented medium of light and sound. The majority of the class will focus on how the great directors create a particular the world for the spectator, using camera angle, the shot, and rhythm, the cut. We will start with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and move through examples from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Terence Davies’s Distant Voices/Still Lives before looking at contemporary Hollywood David Fincher’s The Social Network and the current master of European cinema Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. The final part of the class will consider cinema as the great international medium ­ the only truly global art which offers us unparalleled insight into other cultures and societies.


Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a giant in the fields of film and literary modernism, with his book James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word now considered a classic. In the seventies he was a leading figure on the Screen editorial board; in the eighties he was Head of Production at the British Film Institute, producing films like Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes. In the nineties he produced a series on The Century of Cinema working with directors like Scorsese, Godard, Oshima and Frears. Since 2000 he has worked with Isaac Julien and Chris Marker, as well as setting up the Derek Jarman Lab teaching students in the humanities how to think with images. His most recent venture is a collaboration with the Lab and Tilda Swinton to make a series of four films on John Berger. The first of these films, Ways of Listening, premieres at the Telluride Film Festival this August.

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