BFI Film Classics

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.

Stanley Kubrick hailed The Shining as 'the scariest horror film of all time' before its release in 1980. Though the film opened to poor reviews, it has since become one of the most admired horror films in cinema history. Exerting an enormous influence on popular culture, The Shining has spawned a vast array of interpretations and conspiracy theories. Roger Luckhurst's illuminating study explores the film's themes, tropes and resonances through a detailed analysis of sequences and performances.

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic.

This study of Jaws (1975) examines how Steven Spielberg's breakout film not only redefined the thriller but also pioneered the summer blockbuster, cementing his reputation as a master filmmaker. Against the odds of a catastrophic location shoot, 27-year-old Spielberg delivered a film so effective that it became the highest-grossing movie of its time, transforming Hollywood's approach to event cinema.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Both are distant — emotionally and spatially — from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film’s poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation’s structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure...

Mark Kermode’s compelling study of this horror classic was originally published in 1997, and then extensively updated and expanded in 2003 to incorporate the discovery of new material. This revised edition documents the deletion and reinstatement of key scenes that have now been integrated into the film to create The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen. Candid interviews with director William Friedkin and writer/producer William Peter Blatty reveal the behind the-scenes battles which took place during the production.

Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), won a total of 76 awards and is one of the most commercially successful Spanish-language films ever made. Blending the world of monstrous fairytales with the actual horrors of post-Civil War Spain, the film's commingling of real and fantasy worlds speaks profoundly to our times. This study of Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece places 'Pan's Labyrinth' in its cultural and historical contexts, and provide an illuminating analysis of the film's techniques, themes and meanings.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy, is often cited as the ‘best’ and most popular Star Wars movie. In her compelling study, Rebecca Harrison draws on previously unpublished archival research to reveal a variety of original and often surprising perspectives on the film, from the cast and crew who worked on its production through to the audiences who watched it in cinemas.

Ridley Scott's dystopian classic Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, combines noir with science fiction to create a groundbreaking cyberpunk vision of urban life in the twenty-first century. In his innovative and nuanced reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of Blade Runner and its steadily improving fortunes following its release in 1982.

A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring films of modern cinema – its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Exploring the ways in which Alien compels us to think about otherness, Luckhurst demonstrates how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings about the fragility of humanity.

In her insightful study of this classic, Gayatri Chatterjee draws on new research in the Mehboob studio archive to outline the film's eventful production history, the ambitious vision of its director, and the performances of its stars. Rooted both in Hindu mythology and in the collective experience of a newly-independent nation-state on the brink of industrialisation and social change, this family melodrama inexorably towards tragedy and renewal.

In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.