Gresham College: Prof. Ian Christie – The Worlds of Powell and Pressburger: #1/3 – Archers Assemble: Creating The Powell-Pressburger Partnership – The Birth Of Powell & Pressburger

About this series

Professor Ian Christie A series of three lectures on the cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, exploring how their partnership formed, and what it gave to British cinema.

 

About this lecture

When Alexander Korda teamed Michael Powell with Emeric Pressburger in 1939, a lasting partnership between this Englishman and refugee Hungarian must have seemed unlikely. Yet they soon discovered a remarkable bond, pushing each other far beyond what they could do separately, and creating a unique body of filmmaking.

This lecture explores how the partnership worked during the 1940s, drawing in collaborators from many backgrounds who also gave of their best, and benefiting from the unique conditions of wartime Britain.

About Professor Ian Christie

Professor Christie is Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media at Gresham College. He is a renowned British film scholar and currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy.

He has researched and published on many aspects of film history, including Eisenstein and Russian cinema, Powell and Pressburger, Gilliam and Scorsese, and is a regular broadcaster on cinema. He has also worked on many exhibitions, including Spellbound (Hayward, 1996), Modernism (V&A, 2006) and Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017). His current exhibition, Animatograph!, will be at London Metropolitan Archives during September-October 2019, and his monograph Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago University Press) will appear later this year.