It’s not often that we raise a glass to state-funded cultural commissariats on this page but this year is the 75th birthday of the British Film Institute (BFI to its friends) and the now-venerable organisation is encouraging us to join in the celebrations.

Founded in 1933 – the year in which, Wikipedia tells me, Kim Novak and Michael Caine were born, King Kong was released and the chocolate chip cookie was invented – the BFI has encouraged successive governments to value film as highly as they do more established art forms and provided inspiration to similar organisations around the world.

Over the years, it’s got a lot of people hot under the collar. Some critics wanted to know whether the initials actually stood for ‘British Films Ignored’ – domestic product was either neglected or patronised, especially if it didn’t conform to current fashions.

The Institute also gained a not-entirely-unfair reputation for pretension over the years, the sort of place where everyone wore black polo-neck sweaters and talked about structuralism over filtered coffee. These eggheads were frequently attacked for elitism, most notably by Raymond Durgnat, this country’s greatest writer on cinema and a tireless warrior against the sort of cant that passed for film criticism back in the day.

It couldn’t last. The short version is that New Labour wanted the BFI to be more accessible to The Taxpayer, whose largesse funded it. The black polo neck sweaters were consigned to the back of the wardrobe and the bloodletting began. The biggest casualty was the BFI’s production arm. Over the years they supported some of Britain’s most innovative directors – Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, Bill Douglas, Derek Jarman, Chris Petit and Kevin Brownlow. Not all the films were good but they were seldom less than interesting. Trouble is, ‘interesting’ didn’t cut it for the government. They wanted ‘accessibility’, which for them, meant a crackdown on la-di-da arthouse stuff that no-one wanted to see. And to make sure they got the picture, Alan Parker – a vigorous hammerer of intellectuals – was installed as chairman of the BFI. A discreet veil should be draped over the painful period of readjustment that followed.

The main thing we should celebrate this year is that we still have a BFI and that it still has responsibilities which haven’t been appropriated by the UK Film Council. Indeed, there’s a renewed confidence about the organisation, with a commitment to education and some ambitious projects, like Screenonline, which show it in rude health. The DVD label is flourishing: they’ve owned 2008 with releases like Land of Promise and Cluny Brown.

It was inevitable that the BFI had to change. It could be a hermetic organisation, speaking only to itself and failing in its basic responsibilities to promote cinema as an art form. The transition has been abrupt and the new order has its critics, who have attacked it as anti-intellectual. Certainly, the new regime sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’. It’s a distinction they must learn if the BFI is to have any relevance in the future.

But let’s not spoil the party. Happy birthday, BFI. You look good for your age.

Georges Franju earned a place in film history even before he plonked himself down in the director’s chair. He and his friend Henri Langlois virtually created the concept of film archives; many of the films we enjoy today survive only because they preserved them in the vaults of their nascent Cinémathèque.

It’s tempting to use this love of vintage film to explain Franju’s later involvement with Judex. After all, it was a remake of a serial originally cranked out by one of the titans of early cinema, Louis Feuilade. But Franju’s Judex – originally released in 1963 and newly arrived on DVD – is no mere homage and reveals Franju as so much more than an archivist.

Feuilade’s Judex (Latin for ‘judge’) was a mysterious masked avenger who seeks revenge on the evil banker who ruined his family. Franju maintains the same outline – once again, an evil banker is punished (a notion that provides fresh entertainment in these credit-crunching times) but it soon becomes clear that he means to depart from Feuilade’s template.

One of the things that characterises his serials (which include Fantômas and Les Vampires, both of which are thoroughly recommended) is their relentless forward motion: their stories rarely pause for reflection – there’s always another fiendish plot or underhand undertaking to discourage our heroes from introspection.

By contrast, Franju has little interest in momentum. His film is about moments, interludes and set-pieces. There’s a fascinating tension between the pulp sensibilities which are the film’s foundation and the dream-like decorations Franju covers them with. The story line mimics the traditional back-and-forth of the serial format but it’s clear that the director had little interest in pulse-pounding excitement.

Rather, he sets about creating mood, as though he is trying to recreate not the plot of the serial but the sensations that the original viewers felt. We aren’t told why Judex does the things he does – there’s no tidy motivation like ‘revenge’ here – nor even who he might be. Franju makes him a conjurer, then adds the suggestion that this is not simply sleight of hand and that Judex might actually have magical powers.

Above all, Franju seeks to create wonder. He fills his film with moments that defy description. The greatest of these is the masked ball where we first meet Judex, where the guests are dressed in elaborate bird masks. It’s not saying too much to call this one of the greatest sequences in the whole canon of cinema. Certainly, I can’t think of anything else that uses the elements of film – production design, movement, lighting, editing and music – to better effect.

Instead of reverently imitating Feuilade, Franju honours him by building on his achievements. The film might be better understood as a tribute rather than a remake, with motifs from other Feuilade films thrown into the mix – a villainess in a black body stocking, just like Irma Vep in Les Vampires, a bumbling detective giving himself chills reading the latest chapter of Fantômas’ exploits.

Judex shows one great filmmaker tipping his hat to another. For Franju was a great filmmaker, albeit a much underrated one. His film Eyes Without a Face is universally hailed as a masterpiece and yet his other films remain out of circulation.

Happily, the excellent Masters of Cinema DVD of Judex also includes another Franju film, the thoroughly entertaining Nuits Rouge. Let’s hope there are more in the pipeline. It would be a painful irony if the films made by this pioneering archivist were imprisoned in the vaults, away from the light.

Of all the great pleasures afforded to cinephiles, surely the greatest is the thrill of discovery. The joy of falling in love with a new film is being reminded of why you love the damn medium in the first place – remember the rush you got when you first discovered Hitchcock or Dreyer (or Michael Winner, should that be the sort of thing that floats your boat)?

Such revelations become rarer as you see more films but there’s always something waiting around the corner to expose the gaping holes in your knowledge of ‘the movies’. Which is as good a moment as any to introduce you to the latest figure to remind just how much I have left to learn: Evgenii Bauer, the most interesting filmmaker I’ve encountered for some time.

Bauer was the leading director of Tsarist Russia. Although he was only active for four years (starting in 1913), he was responsible for over fifty films. He died in 1917, before the Bolsheviks stormed the barricades; his work was quickly forgotten in the fervid climate that followed. Newly rediscovered, the BFI have issued three of his films on a DVD that illustrates just how special he was.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay Bauer is that I’m still not sure whether this is all an elaborate hoax, similar to Peter Jackson’s mockumentary Forgotten Silver. That film purported to be an account of the hitherto obscure cinematic genius who actually invented all the tricks directors take for granted. Bauer’s films are not that radical (there’s no colour or sound) but they are uncommonly sophisticated. Can they really be over 90 years old? Since no one’s claimed responsibility yet, the answer must be yes.

We often talk of films being ‘ten years ahead of their time’ but the three films on this BFI disc resemble more closely the films of the early 1920’s (or maybe the post-war ‘teens) than they do their creaky contemporaries. As befits the work of a former caricaturist and set designer, the films are visually striking and Bauer shows a highly evolved sense of what the camera can do. The lighting is evocative and his framing is deliberate.

Decades before Renoir and John Ford exploited the depth of the frame, Bauer was staging action away from the camera. There’s a masterful early shot in the earliest film here – Twilight of a Woman’s Soul – that uses silhouettes in the foreground to direct our gaze to the figure in the background. This is no mere pictorial effect either, but a careful exposition of the character’s state of mind.

As with most films of this period, the camera is largely static but Bauer tries to give it a greater mobility. Other directors had experimented with a moving camera (most famously Pastrone in Cabiria) but Bauer’s confidence is staggering. His moves aren’t just lateral but again make use of space, tracking backwards to explore an environment. The film After Death introduces a sequence with a long pan across a bustling soiree, then follows its protagonist as he is introduced to the guests with a lengthy tracking shot.

Perhaps Bauer’s greatest achievement, however, is that these films remain absorbing. Watching primitive cinema can sometimes seem like archeology: they don’t offer much to the modern viewer beyond a sense of historical curiosity. By contrast, these films are about so much more than pioneering technical achievements.

There’s a real vision on display here, sometimes dark and decidedly morbid (it’s intriguing to reflect on what that says about the character of pre-revolutionary Russia, where Bauer was a box office champ). The title of this DVD – Mad Love – is a succinct summary of his art. Two of the films – After Death and The Dying Swan are pre-occupied with… well, that the words ‘death’ and ‘dying’ in the titles should give you a pretty strong hint. Twilight of a Woman’s Soul is a haunting, downbeat melodrama filmed with admirable economy and profound moral seriousness.

Bauer was working against a backdrop of the first world war and perhaps that cataclysm helps explain this darkness. It certainly explains why his films made such little impact outside his native land: Russia had sealed her borders when war broke out and stopped exporting films. (The flip side of that is that they stopped importing them too. It’s therefore possible Bauer developed his extraordinary techniques independently of other filmmakers, which suggests his achievement could be greater still.)

I’ve come late to Bauer; he was rediscovered in the archives as the Soviet system crumbled and his reputation has been rising steadily since as he’s claimed his rightful place in film history. This DVD was released in 2002, so I can only apologise for taking so long – although time is surely relative when you’re talking about films of this vintage.

No director as prolific as Bauer is able to maintain a consistent quality, so I regretfully expect that not all my new hero’s work will impress me as much as those on this DVD. Indeed – whisper it – I didn’t overly care for The Dying Swan. The other films, however, knocked my socks off and I commend them to anyone with an interest in dark and brooding tales. This is what movies can do. This is why they matter. This is why we love them.

Talk about feeling your age; a radio feature I heard recently made me feel positively ancient. The feature is fairly simple: one listener shares their film tastes with the nation and is rewarded suggestions for other films they might like. Since this is yoof radio, the recommendations are largely – but not exclusively – modern. I was intrigued by one caller who wanted to big up an older film.

The caller went to great lengths to stress the antiquity of their selection. ‘Old’, ‘really old’ and really, really old’ were among the descriptions offered. “But it’s still good,” she said, apparently genuinely surprised that anything made before the dawning of Will Ferrell’s reign of terror could have any value.

The thing is, the film she recommended – this ancient artefact – was Scent of a Woman: blind Al Pacino bluffing and blustering his way to an Oscar. That was – what? 1992? I think it was released in the UK in 1993, which was when I saw it. That was the year I left school. No wonder I’m reaching for the Zimmer frame.

Well, I suppose that’s what you get for listening to Radio One. But it set me thinking, not just about my own imminent decrepitude, but about what we mean when we say a film is ‘old’. It’s a term I try not to use. We don’t talk about ‘old’ paintings or ‘old’ plays. The great canon of English literature is comprised of timeless masterpieces, not ‘old’ books. There are those who refuse to watch films in black and white; do they refuse to listen to Revolver or Pet Sounds because they’re mixed in Mono?

It doesn’t matter that most ‘old’ films were made to please a mass audience, that they were made by folks who knew how to play the audience like a violin. Nor indeed that modern filmmakers pillage these ‘old’ films for stories, gags and characters. The prejudice against ‘old’ films is a wide-spread one; I suppose I should be pleased that the lass who loved Scent of a Woman could see its merits through the cobwebs.

What, I wonder, would she have made of Les Vampires? Because that really is old. Very old. Old enough for even this dedicated fan of silent cinema to think, “Hmm. This is an old movie.” Cinema was (officially) twenty years old when Louis Feuillade cranked his cameras on it but the medium was still establishing what it could do. What we take for granted as ‘cinema’ evolved gradually and those pioneering works – before things like editing, shot selection and lighting were fully assimilated – require a certain indulgence, even from sympathetic viewers.

Take Fantomas, for instance. Feuillade made that in 1913, two years before he unleashed Les Vampires. Fantomas plays out in front of theatrical flats and very basic settings. The actors show no great sympathy with their roles, the camera is essentially static and editing is restricted to cutting between scenes. Sure, there’s a lot to like: there’s a fantastic energy to it and great pulp surrealism (Fantomas steals someone’s fingerprints by… no, wait. That would be a spoiler.) But while it’s sophisticated for 1913, it looks rather less so in 2008.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Les Vampires was how we can visibly observe Feuillade learning from his earlier work. We observe the development within a couple of scenes of Les Vampires. There’s much greater use of the frame’s depth and more imaginative framing. There are some lovely shots that actually make use the theatrical sets, such as when one of the Vampires (the criminal gang at the movie’s heart) is seen apparently sticking his head into the next room, where a mask hangs on the wall. The technique is still rudimentary but we get a sense of a brilliantly imaginative director, using what he has to best advantage.

And it still grips. There’s a thrilling moment when a poster advertising the performer (and secret baddie) ‘IRMA VEP’ rearranges itself to show her name is an anagram of ‘VAMPIRE’ – a moment that reminded me of Fritz Lang – except Fritz Lang hadn’t been near a movie camera when this was made. (Incidentally, Irma Vep is often described as the principal baddie of Les Vampires; she’s certainly the most iconic character, even inspiring a recent film called ‘Irma Vep’. Yet she’s only ever a junior partner-in-crime, never leading the gang and ultimately relegated to marrying the head Vampire. Was Feuillade too much a man of his time to allow a woman to be the leader?)

Of course, at the time the film was being made, the Great War was raging. It’s interesting how it is obliquely reflected in the film. One of the villains – ‘Venomos’ – uses poison gas on his enemies; rocket-bombs are directed at civilians and ships are sunk. The Surrealists were early champions of the director and it’s easy to see why. Like them, reality for Feuillade is only raw material, to be re-imagined and re-shaped, revealing things hidden by every day life.

There must have been something in the air around 1915; D.W. Griffith released Birth of a Nation that year. It’s a hard film to watch – the racism is noxious and inescapable – but it summarised everything that was known about cinema up until that point and arguably influenced everything that followed. It’s the point where cinema as we might know it today began. We can’t, sadly, say the same about the Feuillade.

Yet in other respects, his legacy is greater. The films seem so much more modern than Griffith’s Victorian melodramas. They turn in on themselves, regenerating and renewing themselves. Originally released as a serial, Les Vampires tops five hours. It fills that time easily, with invention and imagination. To watch it is to see a medium that began as a fairground novelty slowly realising it could become an art form. There’s no getting away from the fact it’s an ‘old’ movie but it’s a fascinating one. Better even than Scent of a Woman.

The longest American presidential campaign in history is almost over and the world will soon be counting down the days until the victor takes over from the present, much despised, incumbent.

A curious time, then, for Oliver Stone to give us W., his film about Bush and his administration. Stone’s been widely admonished for making the film and not just by those on the right. Do we really need to be reminded of why we’re trying to forget the past eight years?

On further reflection, however, the film becomes a more interesting proposition. Consider its protagonist – a former drunk who became the most powerful man on earth. That’s a good story. And this is even better: at the time of some of the greatest crises in its history, the country was led by a man almost comically out of his depth. I haven’t, at the time of writing, seen Stone’s salute to his departing commander-in-chief but he’s tapped a rich vein.

As Shakespeare knew, back in the day, you can carve great drama from the lives of Great Men. His kings might have been monarchs by divine right but they were still men, often laid low by the passions, doubts and rages that all mere mortals have to struggle with. We’d like to believe our rulers are better than this – that they wield vast power benignly and responsibly: the contrast is what makes them compelling characters.

As the film about our own dear Queen has shown, it’s a formula that still enthrals. So it’s strange that most movies are so coy when they feature the frequently overheated personalities that have sat in the oval office.

Hollywood prefers to peer at past presidents through rose-coloured movie cameras. Take John Ford’s Young Mister Lincoln, a fanciful fiction of Honest Abe’s life before politics, starring Henry Fonda at his most honourable. It’s wonderful in many ways – backwoods Americana as only Ford could shoot it – but hamstrung by its reverence for its title character. It could scarcely be more respectful if they’d ditched Fonda and represented Lincoln as a beam of pure, white light.

The implication is that Lincoln was a uniquely good individual whose greatness was inherent: we’re invited to bask in his beneficence for a hundred minutes. The Great Emancipator is hardly the only president to be so feted either. Most movies about the presidency are so awe-struck that they they forget how much more absorbing they’d be if they treated these fascinating men as the flawed human beings that history (and common sense) tells us they were.

The only pre-W. President who isn’t treated as a saint shows what fertile ground it can be: Oliver Stone’s biopic Nixon is a surprisingly sympathetic examination of Tricky Dicky. Nixon isn’t the monster the long hairs claimed he was but a man tortured by self-loathing and unable to accept his tremendous achievements.

Even if W. (the film) fails as badly as W. (the president), it’s a film that – unlike most biopics – deserved to be made. Not to please sanctimonious liberals but because it’s a life that lends itself to drama. Bush’s certainty, his hubris, his nemesis – all that makes him a fascinating character. Modern cinema needs more of those.

We don’t really do TV round these parts. This here’s Film Buff territory, governed by certain assumptions about the gogglebox. No one’s denying that the telly has facilitated some remarkable work over the years and if you want to rap about (Old Skool) Doctor Who then baby, I’m your man. Yet no-one’s going to convince me that most TV has any claim on my time, especially given the teetering pile of still-unwatched DVDs resting upon my shelves.

Which brings us neatly to Mad Men, newly arrived on DVD after completing its run across a sampling of BBC channels. It arrived on a perfumed carpet of hype, the next big thing writ large. Ever open minded, I sat down, fully expecting to have my horrible elitist prejudices confirmed once again. Remarkably, they weren’t

Whatever expectations were raised by the publicity were exceeded by the show itself. Indeed, It was a show that raised expectations with every new episode and somehow kept exceeding them, surging ever further ahead of its rivals with each new instalment.

A brief recap for newcomers: it’s 1960, and the hottest adman on Madison Avenue is Don Draper, creative genius at Sterling-Cooper. Tall, handsome and cool as fuck, he’s the guy that has it all, right down to the Doris Day-a-like wife waiting for him in the suburbs with an apple pie in the oven. There’s office politics to deal with – thrusting young Pete Campbell has his eye on Don’s office – but come cocktail hour, there’s usually a martini with his name on it.

At the heart of Mad Men is a big idea: the way we package and present modern life is a gross distortion of the real product. The programme suggests that we’re as truthful about our lives – our wants and our needs – as an ad man’s jingle. No one knows this better than Don himself: “What you call love,” he says at one point “was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” As the show progresses, we learn that he’s really a punk farm kid called Dick Whitman who re-branded himself after a fortuitous accident. Having created his perfect nest, he’s imprisoned his wife in it, seeking to cure her anxieties and problems not with attention or love but by sending her to the shrink.

One of the great joys of the programme is the way it takes us behind the masks that the characters wear. Pete Campbell, for instance, starts off as the office snake – he prepares for his marriage by bedding Peggy, Don’s secretary. But the writers want us to understand him. They show us his frustration: he doesn’t have the talent to fulfil his ambitions. He feels patronised by his wealthy father in law but is dependent on the old man’s connections if he’s to advance at work.

Of course, there’s nothing new about pointing out that despair and disillusionment lurk behind the pastel façade of suburbia: Blue Velvet and American Beauty are just two of the films that have done just that. But I can’t think of anything that has tackled the theme with the maturity or the empathy of Mad Men. There’s no patronising the characters or sneering at the lifestyle they’ve chosen, just a numb awareness of what it’s doing to them. For all Betty Draper’s material comforts, by the end of the season, the only person who really listens to her is an eleven year old boy.

Mad Men is lighter on incident than most TV shows, but the slow build, concentrating on character, culminates in some devastating moments. In the final episode, for instance, there’s a sequence where Don Draper demonstrates Kodak’s new slide projector. You can find it on You Tube: watched in isolation, it’s compelling – maybe even magical. But in context, given all that’s gone before and knowing what Don’s thinking, it becomes utterly heartbreaking.

Most of the press has focused on the recreation of the era and the obvious differences between our own: there’s no smoking ban here, nor equality legislation. Women are eye candy and the closet has got a great big lock on it to stop Gays coming out of it. But while we’ve made many improvements, there’s still a lot we haven’t learned. Although it’s set in the past, Mad Men is urgently contemporary in its critique of materialism: the adds are less slick, the products are clunkier but the pressures and stresses of life are common to the era in which it’s set and the era in which it’s filmed.

The show was created by Matthew Weiner, who wrote (and judging by the credits re-wrote) most of the episodes. He even directed some of it too, so film buffs should feel comfortable that there’s an auteur we can talk about. But while the first season has been superior to almost every American movie of the past five years (at least), it strikes me that the movies might not be the best comparison. Instead, I’m reminded of a novel. Specifically, I’m thinking of how 19^th century authors like Dickens and Wilkie Collins (and, to be fair, many others whose work has not lasted so well) would publish their works in instalments before collecting them together in the form we now know.

What interests me is that DVD box sets might be the equivalent of those collected volumes, gathering together the separate episodes (chapters?) into a unified whole. Certainly there are more shows, like Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos or even Lost, that have a continuing, developing narrative rather than the more traditional self-contained episodes that most shows still favour. Potential viewers will surely have a very different relationship with these collected editions, no longer picking out favourite stories but committing to the bigger picture. I can’t help but wonder how this – in combination with the changes in distribution and delivery of movies that we know are coming – will affect cinema itself.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. If you haven’t seen Mad Men, the DVD is unreservedly recommended and, since that DVD seems heavy with extras, it’s a good buy for existing fans too. I won’t pretend that it’s dramatically changed my opinion of Television. But it’s certainly softened it.

It’s David Lean’s centenary this year and although the anniversary itself was in March, the BFI are celebrating with a jamboree of revivals and retrospectives. What better time to consider his career?

But then I realised I had nothing new to say. The standard critical line on Sir David is that the early films were wonderful, the later work bloated and self-important; “when a director dies, he becomes a cameraman”, as Pauline Kael had it. Oh, I can refine it slightly (my rule of thumb is: ignore Lean’s colour films, although I’ve a fondness for Summer Madness) and I can mount a spirited defence of Ryan’s Daughter (horribly miscast, madly overblown yet brilliantly written by Robert Bolt, and concluded beautifully). Those aside, my opinions are entirely orthodox.

What I’m more interested in is what those opinions say about the critical caste. Because for most folks, it’s the later Lean they love. To use a personal example: my Dad loves Bridge on the River Kwai. Doctor Zhivago might be his favourite film. I’ve watched both with him and in both cases there were two different films playing: I couldn’t see the stirring masterpieces he was watching, he couldn’t see the pomposity that irritated me.

This division between popular taste and critical values is most regularly glimpsed in the foul reviews most Hollywood films attract in the daily press but these are bad examples: it’s surely inevitable that a film aimed at teenagers will attract a frosty response from the curmudgeons who write movie reviews. Lean is a much better case study; the enduring popularity of his ‘big’ films exposes the gulf between mainstream opinion and the critics.

It’s worth pondering why there can be such divergence between those who write about films and those who are content just to enjoy them. My suspicion is that the two sides watch films in different ways. When you’re obliged to write even a short review of a film, you have to consider how you’re going to fill the blank page that’s waiting for you after the end credits. Saying that it was ‘cool’ or it ‘sucked’ won’t cut the mustard: you need to explain why.

Inevitably, this means you’re more aware of your relationship to what’s on screen. Far from taking you out of a film, I find it makes the experience much more intense. But it means you’re more aware of empty spectacle and sensation, hallmarks of the later work of David Lean.

Of course, that’s only my opinion. It’s not holy writ. No need to get steamed up about it if you don’t agree. That’s the point of criticism: it’s subjective. Crucially, however, criticism explains how it reached its conclusions. When you start having to do that, you start thinking a lot harder about what you’re watching and you’ll be judging movies by a different standard.

Having concentrated on division, let us end with harmony. For this is the centenary of that great director David Lean. Not that we need excuses to revisit Brief Encounter, Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, one of the greatest of all films. But it’s an ideal prompt to watch lesser-known work like The Passionate Friends or Madeleine. They remind us how wonderful movies can be – and on that, I hope we can all agree.

Summer’s here and with it, the seasonal cinema: big box-office-bursting behemoths. And, no doubt, trailing in their wake will be the inevitable pieces from serious cineastes, bemoaning the success of these vapid entertainments.

This isn’t, I hope, going to be one of them. It’s not that I dispute the critical analysis – how can I? – but rather, I think it misses the point about big movies. These are the only films most folk bother with; laying into them makes the egg-heads sound shrill and elitist. It’s also a touch hypocritical. It’s not hard to find contemporary reviews of film buff faves like North by Northwest and Rio Bravo, apparently written with the same poison pen many reviewers used to spear Speed Racer with.
We can condemn the showmanship and hype as crass. And, yes, there has to be more to cinema than empty sensation. At the same time, however, it can be a joy to sit as part of a capacity audience and to share the experience. I was reminded of that when I went to the final Pirates of the Caribbean flick last year.
It was rammed: with teenagers and pensioners, with harassed parents giving the nippers a holiday treat. Judging by the mounds of confectionery and the way they laughed at adverts that had been on heavy rotation for months, I figured most of them weren’t cinema regulars. And so what? It was a good crowd to be a part of, free of the cynicism that can sometimes waft through the art houses.
What surprised me, though, was how little they seemed to enjoy it. There was none of the enthusiasm which I observed at, say, Lord of the Rings or the first Pirates flick. Now, I accept what follows is as unscientific as Creationism but the thing is, I’ve noticed this sort of dissatisfied audience reaction at any number of the blockbusters I’ve attended in recent years.
It’s not that the people are tiring of spectacle and excess. My sense is that they’re getting frustrated with how bloated and self-important these films have become. Hands up who else thinks modern blockbusters are too long? That last Pirates flick was pushing three hours! And hands up who else is fed up with not being able to follow the action?
This last point is important because action is one of the major selling points of a summer movie. Yet directors have forgotten how to stage it. Instead, each set-piece gets divided by hundred of cuts, rendering everything incomprehensible. Maybe this looks ‘cool’ if you’re jacked up on sugared drinks from the concessions stand but it don’t do it for me.
I want to explicitly exonerate Paul Greengrass, whose remarkable work on the Bourne series uses this aesthetic brilliantly. But then, he’s a real filmmaker and it’s part of his overall strategy. Too often, though, rapid-fire editing is used by clods who have no idea how to build momentum, pace a movie or carry an audience.

Summer movies exert a powerful gravity. Despite the above, I’ll probably check out a couple of this year’s juggernauts. However, I have an inkling I’m not the only one to get ever diminishing returns for my ticket money. In an age of piracy and audience fragmentation, perhaps that’s something for the studios to consider.

The 26th of May is something of a red-letter day in the DVD release calendar. Whether this is because of a conjunction of the planets in the far-distant heavens or some sinister international conspiracy of art-house DVD labels, I don’t know. But whatever the reason, there’s a whole bunch of films released that day which are surely of interest to the discerning sort of person who shops at MovieMail.

For instance, Masters of Cinema release Akasen Chitai + Yokihi, their final double bill of late-period Mizoguchi films (any chance of some early ones, gents?) The BFI drop four films. First, the long-awaited (by me, at least) release of A Cottage on Dartmoor. Then there’s A Walk With Love and Death, a John Huston project rescued from limbo and happily restored to polite society.

You can – and frankly should – also get your hands on Lubitsch’s final masterpiece, the droll delight that is Cluny Brown. And then there’s another long-awaited (by me etc etc) British film, Radio On. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – harrowing, outstanding – is made available by the good folk at Artificial Eye, while Tartan give us Chan-Wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg (But That’s OK.) And I haven’t mentioned collections gathering work by Paul Verhoeven and Andrzej Wajda. Nor things like Bandit Queen. Phew!

If that were everything, it would be a good week indeed. But there’s more. Right at the bottom of the page is what might be the pick of the litter: They Made Me A Fugitive. Not, perhaps, the most celebrated title but one that really does deserve to be better know. Even if it were not a good film (which, incidentally, it is), it would be of interest because it’s directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.

As the name might suggest, Cavalcanti wasn’t from round these parts. Born in Brazil, he arrived in Blighty after a spell in France working with the likes of Renoir. He threw his lot in with the documentary movement – he supervised Night Mail – before being headhunted by Ealing Studios to work for them. His most widely seen work is Dead of Night – he handled the linking scenes and the best story (Michael Redgrave and his dummy) but it’s Went the Day Well that is the masterpiece.

I included Went The Day Well on my ‘alternative’ list of best British films last year but frankly, it deserves to be hovering near the more orthodox accounts of our national cinema too. (Incidentally, I wanted to include Radio On on that list but it wasn’t available on DVD at the time of writing. Now that it is, it can take the place of The Offence.) It’s an astoundingly brutal film considering it’s supposed to be a wartime morale booster and it made me a Cavalcanti devotee.

They Made Me a Fugitive isn’t quite as brutal, or rather, its brutality manifests itself in different ways. It doesn’t have the same inexorable forward momentum as Went The Day Well; the pace is just a little more relaxed. But more even than its predecessor, it has contempt for the politeness of British cinema and little hypocrisies of society. It’s an unflinching film: women are beaten, drugs are smuggled (at least I assume it’s drugs, not actually sherbet, as the gang-leader claims). The police aren’t infallible.

And for a film made in 1947, it offers a very unflattering portrait of the home-coming heroes. Trevor Howard is the titular ‘Me’: Clem Morgan, ex-RAF, ex-POW and finding it hard to adjust to life on civvie street. He drinks too much; he misses the excitement – so he gets involved with the titular ‘They’: some nasty black-marketeers.

But Clem isn’t totally without scruple, which rubs the headman Narcy (Griffith Jones) up the wrong way. Narcy’s also taken a shine to Clem’s lady-friend, so when a copper gets killed during one of their raids, Narcy frames Clem and lets him face the music – breaking rocks on Dartmoor – leaving Narcy free to make his moves. Naturally Clem escapes, and revenge is high on the agenda.

What’s most remarkable about They Made Me A Fugitive is just how close it is to the contemporary American crime films that would subsequently become known as Film Noir. We often talk of British Noir – Brighton Rock, Odd Man Out and the like – but while they share certain common elements with the American films, their concerns are ultimately different. They Made Me A Fugitive is the real thing, something that’s in sympathy with the aims and ambitions of the very best Noir. It could have been produced by RKO or Monogram.

Except, had it been made in America, I dare say the production code might have had a few suggestions to make about the film. I can’t imagine they’d be too happy about the grim vignette in which Clem shelters with a woman who begs him to kill her alcoholic husband. And they’d have probably exploded when they saw the conclusion, which openly laughs at the conventions of the happy ending. To say more is to spoil it but it’s safe to say that you won’t predict the ultimate resolution.

As an outsider, Cavalcanti saw a different Britain than the natives. Coming from the documentary tradition, he was interested in telling the truth as he saw it. This is a very squalid Britain, sordid and grim. Indeed, I can’t think of another film from that era – or even for another a couple of decades – that showed this country in such a bad light; it paints a very different portrait of austerity Britain than we’re used to.

It’s a tough picture, pretty much the diametric opposite of the film that made Trevor Howard’s name, Brief Encounter. It’s enough to confirm Cavalcanti as a major filmmaker, one deserving of much more attention than he currently receives. I’ve seen very little of his work (which spanned three continents, at least) but even if the rest is bobbins, he made at least two bona-fide masterpieces.

I don’t doubt that there’ll be a shed load of titles in your shopping basket on May 26th but if you’ve got room for one more, then it’s only £7.99. It’s not much to see a master at work.

It’s perhaps a wee bit early to be talking about the best DVD of the year but if there’s a better release than the BFI’s splendid Land of Promise this year, I’ll be a very happy little chap indeed. As I’m sure you’re aware, it gathers together many British documentaries made between 1930 and 1950, taking us through those years of profound social change.

It’s a vanished world, of course: even the names of the production companies are enough give the modern viewer a jolt (the Empire Marketing Board?) One of the great attractions of this set is surely the time travel it allows, journeying to a country so familiar and yet so different. It’s a country bedevilled by problems of poverty but one filled with optimism and a touching faith in experts to solve the problems. Hindsight adds a poignant patina to many of these films: the optimistic souls who people these films didn’t know there was a war coming, nor what its cost would be.

But if Land of Promise offered nothing but nostalgia and social history then it would outstay its welcome long before the end of the fourth disc. It’s the quality of the filmmaking that makes it so worthwhile. This is the work of real filmmakers – some of Britain’s best – who knew how to compose a shot, edit the footage and structure their material.

These aren’t documentaries as we’d understand the term today, trading in facts and stories. What these films really document is how their creators felt about what they saw. For instance, Shipyard (directed by Paul Rotha) shows us far more than the nuts‘n’bolts of shipbuilding; we get a sense of the politics of the time (a worker ruminates that he’d never get to travel on the ship he helped build) and an insight into the men away from their work, racing their dogs.

Even less self-conscious films, such as Workers And Jobs, do their jobs in a more imaginative way than many of the public information films later generations are familiar with, using non-professional actors in real locations. (Which is not to diss the raw power of those later public information pics: I remain scarred to this day by the one warning children not to go with strangers. Indeed, I vociferously fought my mother’s plans that I open a Post Office Giro Account because the actor who advertised it played The Stranger in that terrifying, white-knuckle production. I still feel a cold stab of fear when I buy stamps, in case the man behind the counter asks if I’d like to see some puppies.)

What this set illustrates is how broad a church the English documentary movement was. They also show how far some of these filmmakers had diverged from the gospel of John Grierson. Grierson was the high-priest of the documentary movement, who did so much to establish its dominance. Grierson preached that ‘Documentary’ (real, honest, intellectual) was somehow superior to ‘studio’ pictures (meretricious melodramatic soufflés). His was a puritanical dogma that maintained that you could do either one or the other and that only a fool would chose to make entertainments.

Inevitably, this colours discussions not just of the films Grierson produced but the entire documentary tradition, usually to its detriment. But while many (most?) documentarians paid lip service to his nostrums, it’s clear from the films themselves that there were few true believers. Look at that most celebrated of British docs, Night Mail (available separately) which used such realist devices as – er – studio reconstructions and lyric verse to tell its story.

Directors like Hitchcock, Powell and Lean believed that ‘the documentary boys’ looked down their nose at the commercial directors, who felt patronised by Grierson’s edicts. Yet those self-same documentary boys often sailed far away from true realism to pursue their visions: few were so dogmatic that they didn’t re-stage shots or even make stuff up.

Land of Promise shows how many of Grierson’s flock had outgrown his narrow strictures and were making films that, yes, were broadly realist but also personal, artistic and imaginative. Most famously, of course, there’s Humphrey Jennings, whose poetic sensibility profoundly annoyed Grierson. He felt Jennings was an apostate from the true religion but he’s arguably the finest of all British filmmakers.

So if they were willing to create their own realities, why not go the whole hog and add a beginning-middle-and-end story? Why didn’t they extend their critique of British feature films to showing how it should be done? Looking back with the same hindsight that makes films like Housing Problems so poignant, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if the rigid bifurcation between the two disciplines – this artistic sectarianism – hadn’t been so ideologically charged.

Some directors jumped between the trenches, notably Alberto Cavalcanti (who supervised Night Mail and directed Went the Day Well?; we shall return to him in forthcoming weeks.) And Jennings’ Fires Were Started (which, again, you’ll have to buy separately – like that’s a chore) is, basically, a fiction feature film, no matter what its genealogy. Both men validated the documentary tradition and showed how it could enrich other formats. As an enthusiast for British fiction films, I wish more had followed, not least because it would have made it a lot easier for me to see their work.

There’s no use carping over what never was or re-fighting ideological battles long after the generals are dead and gone. There are some remarkable films here, from some of our finest filmmakers. If you have any interest in British filmmaking then Land of Promise is a mandatory release. There’s loads more in the archives too: let’s hope that Volume Two is forthcoming.