Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

David Lean Centennial Conference (1908–2008)

2008; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/e1743452108000459

1755-1714

Brian McFarlane,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

The David Lean centennial conference must be pronounced an unqualified success. Not only was it very efficiently organised by Charles Drazin and Peter Evans, without those irritating parallel sessions as a result of which you always feel you may have chosen the wrong one, but also, importantly, for its pervasive sense of serious reappraisal of Lean’s sixty-year career. The overall standard of papers was high indeed, but there was also, no doubt serendipitously but nonetheless provocative for that, a remarkable sense of their commenting on and complementing each other. There was endemic evidence of the most thorough research and of this having been subjected to very intelligent scrutiny and analysis. For so intensely visual a film-maker as Lean, it was appropriate that the conference should open with an extended compilation of iconic moments from the films, whether of the would-be lovers saying goodbye as her train leaves in Brief Encounter or Hepburn falling backwards into the Grand Canal in Summer Madness or Captain Nicholson and his men marching to the strains of ‘Colonel Bogey’ or the billowing robes of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence. These set the scene evocatively for the ensuing two days. There was a lot of emphasis on the 1940s films – my own preference – but Kevin Brownlow’s superb presentation on the silent films that had influenced the very young Lean caused one to rethink the big films at the end of his career. It was fascinating to relate these large-scale works to those images from The Thief of Bagdad or The Big Parade and others to the pictorial splendours of the later Lean, making this writer at least wonder whether his prejudices were justified.