Ian Christie
Ian Christie - Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London - on the issues faced in producing a new report on the cultural impact of sixty years of British film:
"We know that film is important to people - personally, socially, nationally and internationally. But how can we capture the ways in which it is important, and perhaps measure these? When I was invited to join the Paris-based team bidding to undertake a report for the UK Film Council on 'cultural impact' (Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film 1946-2006), I thought this might be a way of extending the work we had started at Birkbeck on mapping the impact of the early film industry on London. But initially I had no clear idea of the methodology we'd use. In the event, we argued that nothing less than a sample drawn from the full range of British cinema would do - and how were we going to create that? So began a fascinating project that included creating a first draft database of all British features from 1946-2006, and developing a methodology to try to measure the comparative cultural impact of films in the digital era. It is a work in progress, but I hope of some interest to the film and media studies community, as well as to people in production and policy. After all, it's about why what we study is really important!"
Ian Christie joined the Department of History of Art and Screen Media (as it is now called) at Birkbeck in 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 position involved co-producing a television series on early cinema for BBC2, The Last Machine (BBC tx 1995) presented by Terry Gilliam; and co-curating an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Spellbound: Art and Film (1996), which included work by Gilliam, Peter 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 and is currently director of the London Screen Study Collection, housed in Birkbeck's new Centre for Film and Visual Media Research.
Professor Christie is a regular broadcaster and writer for Sight and Sound. His publications include:
- The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design (Wallflower, 2009)
- A Matter of Life and Death (BFI, 2000)
- Gilliam on Gilliam (Faber, 1999) [ed.]
- Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber and Faber, 1996 - revised edition) [ed. with David Thompson]. 4th edition due in 2010.
- 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 (Faber and Faber, 1994 – revised edition)
Further information on Professor Christie’s work can be found at www.ianchristie.org
October 2009
