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Charles Drazin
Charles Drazin of Queen Mary, University of London, on a Special Collection leading him back to a neglected figure in the history of cinema:
"All three of my books on the British cinema have in one way or another drawn substantially on papers held in BFI Special Collections. As regards my present and likely future research for some time, I have the feeling of having come full circle. My first book The Finest Years offered a group portrait of some key figures in the British cinema during the 1940s. A long chapter was devoted to Alberto Cavalcanti, an important but neglected figure in the history of not only the British cinema but many other cinemas besides. When I was writing about him ten years ago, I remember feeling a mild frustration at the impossibility of doing justice to this most peripatetic of film-makers, who made crucial if largely unsung contributions to the French avant-garde of the 1920s, the British documentary movement of the 1930s and Ealing Studios during the 1940s before returning to his native Brazil to encourage a re-birth of the cinema there.
"With a sense of a job that still remained to be completed, I concluded my chapter on Cavalcanti as follows: 'His very versatility and ubiquity make it hard to give him his due. It is difficult enough to track down all the films he made in Britain - or before that in France - let alone what he did in the various countries he passed through afterwards. It is to be hoped that one day someone will succeed in putting together the complete jigsaw of his extraordinary life.'
"Ten years on, the recent donation to the BFI Special Collections of a large archive of Cavalcanti's personal papers makes it possible at last to put together that jigsaw. Although so far I have assembled only a very few of the pieces, it is already clear that this archive is an invaluable resource that will shed important new light on some key episodes in film history. I look forward to sharing some of my discoveries."
Charles Drazin's publications include:
- The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (Andre Deutsch, 1998)
- In Search of The Third Man (Methuen, 1999)
- Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002)
He has recently completed a doctorate on French cinema, and lectures at Queen Mary, University of London.
