Charles Barr
See Charles Barr discussing Hitchcock's style on the occasion of his Researchers' Tales presentation at the BFI Library in 2010.
Charles Barr is a survivor from the first UK generation of academic film students, and then of University film teachers - a case, he says, of finding himself in the right place at the right time.
He worked as a research student with Thorold Dickinson at the Slade School in the early 1960s, publishing his dissertation on CinemaScope in Film Quarterly. After working in secondary and adult education, and in teacher training, he helped to build up undergraduate and graduate film programmes at the University of East Anglia, including the pioneer MA training course in film archiving.
Since retiring from UEA in 2006, he has continued to teach full-time, first at Washington University in St Louis and then at University College Dublin. He is also Adjunct Professor at the John Huston Centre for Film and Digital Media, part of the National University of Ireland in Galway, and is active on the editorial boards of Movie magazine (now published online) and of the US-based scholarly journal The Hitchcock Annual.
He has been a grateful user of BFI archive and library resources since his Slade School years, and more recently of a range of BFI Special Collections, as he describes in a contribution to our Researcher in Focus series.
The main focus of his work shifted, early on, from American to British film history; recently, he has taken advantage of working in his father's country of Ireland to develop some new strands of Irish research.
Professor Barr's Irish research topics include:
- an essay 'Irish Brother Feeney: Francis Ford in John Ford's films', published in Screening Irish America (ed. Ruth Barton, 2009) and available on the Senses of Cinema website.
- a journal article 'Is it his war as well as hers?: Ealing's View of Ireland' forthcoming in Irish Studies Review, early 2011.
- work in progress on Hitchcock and Ireland, exploring both the family links and the intermittent Irish reference points in Hitchcock's films.
Selected other publications include:
- Laurel and Hardy (Studio Vista, 1967)
- Ealing Studios (University of California Press, 1999 - 3rd edition)
- All Our Yesterdays: 90 years of British cinema (British Film Institute, 1986) [ed.]
- English Hitchcock (Cameron & Hollis, 1999)
- Vertigo (British Film Institute, 2002)
November 2010
