BFI Film Classics

A Taste of Honey

Melanie Williams, University of East Anglia, UK This new BFI Film Classic takes a close look at Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), which focuses on a young female protagonist, Jo (Rita Tushingham), who finds herself pregnant after a brief romance with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a Black sailor passing through Salford’s docks Melanie Williams analyses the many ways in which the film was innovative and explores how teenage playwright Shelagh Delaney's strikingly original dramatic visions came to be a landmark film of the British New Wave.

UK April 2023 • US April 2023 • 104 pages • 60 bw illus PB 9781839021558 • £1299 / $1595 ePub 9781839021565 • £1079 / $1510 ePdf 9781839021589 • £1079 / $1510 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute Robert B. Ray, University of Florida, USA & Christian Keathley, Middlebury College, USA This new BFI Film Classic provides an in-depth look into Alan Pakula's 1976 political thriller All the President's Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward Robert Ray and Christian Keathley's close reading of the film shows how its narrative power works through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs noise; stationary vs moving camera; dark scenes vs well-lit scenes, and shallow focus vs deep focus, tracing how all these elements combine to create an underlying formal design that is crucial to the movie’s achievement

UK May 2023 • US May 2023 • 120 pages • 60 colour illus PB 9781839024047 • £1299 / $1595 ePub 9781839024054 • £1079 / $1510 ePdf 9781839024061 • £1079 / $1510 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute

Eraserhead

Claire Henry, Massey University, New Zealand A surreal and darkly humorous vision, Eraserhead has been recognised as a cult classic since its breakout success as a midnight movie in the late 1970s Drawing on original archival research and providing an in-depth analysis of the film’s production history, its rich mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, and its embeddedness in visual art and screen culture, Henry not only affirms Eraserhead's significance as an auteurist debut, but advances a wider case for its status as a film classic

UK May 2023 • US May 2023 • 104 pages • 50 bw illus PB 9781839025600 • £1299 / $1595 ePub 9781839025617 • £1079 / $1510 ePdf 9781839025624 • £1079 / $1510 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute

Memories of Underdevelopment

Memorias del Subdesarrollo

Darlene J. Sadlier, Indiana University, USA This study of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film is divided into five thematic sections, situating the film in its historical context, discussing how Cuban political history affected and informed the production of the film, particularly its use of archival footage; discussing the film as an adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes’s first-person novel ; providing a detailed analysis of the film’s narrative, particularly focusing on the protagonist, Sergio’s, unique “ways of seeing” and how this positions him as an idle, yet curious, flâneur, and finally, focusing on the unique style of the film, highlighting the film’s lasting impact and its role in defining Latin American “new cinema”

UK April 2023 • US April 2023 • 104 pages • 60 bw illus PB 9781839024979 • £1299 / $1595 ePub 9781839024993 • £1079 / $1510 ePdf 9781839025006 • £1079 / $1510 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute