TALK: Ian Christe 'Soviet Cinema – not just great directors but great designers too'

Soviet Cinema – not just great directors but great designers too A talk by Ian Christie, Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College, University of London Some of the greatest production designers of the studio and classic eras in the USA and Europe have begun to win belated recognition, thanks to scholars and historians – not least Ian Christie, the most wide-ranging British film critic-historian of the past 30 years, a champion of the work of John Box, featured in Kent MOMI’s new design exhibition (‘Terence Marsh & Production Design’), and a renowned expert on Soviet cinema. In conjunction with the exhibition, Professor Christie unfolds a penetrating analysis of the obscured designers of such major Soviet classics as The New Babylon , Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 and 2, Kozintsev’s great Shakespeare films, and Kozintsev and Trauberg’s New Babylon . In the case of Eisenstein, a prolific draughtsman, it’s perhaps understandable to believe that effectively he designed Nevsky and Ivan . But the production designer of record for those films was actually Iosif Shpinel, who had forty other credits between 1928 and 1956, and also designed some key films by Barnet, Pudovkin and Ermler. Is it too late to start reclaiming credit for those who designed and built these enduring classics? Click here to buy tickets Sell tickets online with Ticket Tailor