Ian Christie
Senior Lecturer, University College London
Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the co-curator of our exhibition at GRAD Unexpected Eisenstein. He co-curated Eisenstein: His Life and Art (Oxford Museum of Modern Art/Hayward Gallery, 1988). Ian also co-edited Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993) and The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (1988). He is the author of monographs on Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.
The social realities underlying this dystopian fantasy are class struggle and class difference: the incompatibility of bourgeois desire and proletarian demands. The emblematic shot of this impasse is the FAUX TOGRAPHIE, the false photograph, showing bourgeois, workers and peasants posing as a group. Fantasies of class harmony are, on the evidence of Weekend, as horrific as fantasies of revolution.
