Dr Charles Drazin

After taking a BA degree in Classics at Oxford, I worked for many years as an editor in London publishing. In 2006 I completed my PhD on the relationship between the French cinema and Hollywood and took up a lectureship at Queen Mary.

My primary research interest has been in the British cinema. My first book, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998), offered a group portrait of some of the key figures of the British cinema of the 1940s. I then went on to write In Search of The Third Man (1999), to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the celebrated film; and a biography of the producer Sir Alexander Korda, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (2002). In 2008 I was co-organiser of the David Lean centenary conference at Queen Mary and inaugurated a series of annual symposia on the British cinema with the ‘About Lindsay Anderson’ study day. Similar events, on Joseph Losey and Sally Potter, have followed in 2009 and 2010.

During this current academic year 2010/11, I am on study leave, researching a book on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Books and edited works

• The Faber Book of the French Cinema (Faber & Faber, scheduled spring 2011)
• The Man Who Outshone the Sun King (Heinemann, 2008)
• Edited with introduction, The Journals of John Fowles, vol. 2 (Jonathan Cape, 2006)
• Edited with introduction, The Journals of John Fowles, vol. 1 (Jonathan Cape, 2003)
• Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (Macmillan, 2002; pbk edn, I.B. Tauris,  scheduled 2011)
• Co-authored with Ernst Malmsten and Erik Portanger, Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story (Random House, 2001)
• In Search of The Third Man (Methuen, 1999)
• The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (André Deutsch, 1998; pbk edn I.B. Tauris, scheduled 2007)
• Blue Velvet: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (Bloomsbury, 1998)
  

Recent Articles

• Cavalcanti: Lessons in Fusion at the GPO Film Unit’ (forthcoming)
• ‘Some Notes on The Third Man’, booklet accompanying Optimum Blu Ray release of The Third Man, September 2010
• Korda, Colour and the Zeitgeist’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, April, 2010
• ‘If…. Before If….’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, November, 2008
•  ‘Editing: Lean Cuts’, Sight and Sound, July, 2008
• ‘Anglo-American Collaboration: Korda, Selznick and Goldwyn’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), Dialogues with Hollywood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

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