What Makes a Film Classic?

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For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound. 

Before the next such poll, due in 2022, this lecture considers what factors have made certain films and their makers ‘classic’; and why the fifty-year reign of Citizen Kane was ended in 2012 by Hitchcock’s eerie melodrama Vertigo.

The related screening at Cine Lumiere has been cancelled in response to COVID-19 national restrictions.

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This event was on Mon, 18 Jan 2021

Ian Christie

Professor Ian Christie FBA

Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media

Professor Christie is former 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.

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