Lecturer in Film Studies

Room: Arts 1.23
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 2857
Fax: +44 (0)20 8980 5400
email: c.b.drazin@qmul.ac.uk

 

Charles Drazin’s current research interests include the British cinema (in particular the Documentary Movement, the Free Cinema and the British ‘New Wave’); the French cinema and French history; and the relationship between the European cinema and Hollywood.

His first book The Finest Years, which was published in 1998, offered a group portrait of some of the key figures of the British cinema of the 1940s. A new edition will be published by I.B. Tauris in the spring of 2007. The year 1999 saw the publication of In Search of The Third Man, which he wrote to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the making of the celebrated film. He then embarked on an account of arguably the singlemost influential figure in the history of the British cinema, the director and producer Sir Alexander Korda. His biography, published under the deliberately controversial title, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul, was published in 2002. A consistent theme in all these works has been the nature of creativity and collaboration, an interest that Drazin attributes to his many years’ experience working closely with writers and novelists as an editor in literary publishing.

After the publication of Korda, Drazin decided to bring his research within an academic framework. In 2003, he embarked on a doctorate at Queen Mary College on the relationship between the French cinema and Hollywood, which he has recently completed.

He is a committee member of the Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation.

Books and edited works

• 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)
  
• 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)
  
• Blue Velvet: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (Bloomsbury, 1998)
  

Some articles

• ‘Anglo-American Collaboration: Korda, Selznick and Goldwyn’ (forthcoming)
  
• Encylopedia entries, ‘Alberto Cavalcanti’, ‘Felippo Del Giudice’, ‘Sir Alexander Korda’, Encyclopedia of British Film (Methuen, 2003)
  
• Encylopedia entry, ‘Adaptation, stage, film, and TV’, The Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP, 2000)
  
• ‘Olwen Vaughan and the French Club’, London Magazine, October/November 1998 (OUP, 2000)
  
• ‘The Films of David Lynch’, London Magazine, December/January 1996
  
• ‘Robert Hamer’, London Magazine, June/July 1995
  
• ‘Trouble in Mind: Alan Rudolph’, London Magazine, October/November 1993

 

 

 

 

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