Film Awards

 Film Awards

British awards are conferred by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), British Film Institute Awards, Evening Standard British Film Awards, and London Film Critics Circle Awards. BAFTA awarded twenty of its top thirty awards (Best Film, Best Actress and Best Actor each year) to British talents in the 1990s. Since 1960, Britain has obtained top awards at the three major film festivals, Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Awards at Cannes were Best Director in 1993 to Mike Leigh (Naked), the 1996 Palme D’Or for Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, and in the same year Best Actress to Brenda Blethyn (also for Secrets and Lies). At Berlin, the 1994 Golden Bear went to In the Name of the Father, and the 1996 Golden Bear to Sense and Sensibility. At Venice, the Best Acress award in 1991 went to Tilda Swinton (Edward II). British directors receiving top awards at these festivals include Lindsay Anderson, Terence Davies, Isaac Julien, Neil Jordan, Carol Reed, Richard Lester, Ken Loach, Alan Parker, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Ridley Scott and Peter Watkins.

 Britain occupies second place (after the USA) in three of the most prestigious prizes (Oscars, New York Critics Awards and Cannes Festival), taking 25 percent of the awards in New York, 20 percent of the Oscars and 15 percent in Cannes since 1980. At the Oscars (awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), the British tend to win in supporting roles and in American-made films. Yet, four of the fifteen people who have been most often nominated for Academy Awards are British: Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Deborah Kerr and Laurence Olivier. Three members of the Redgrave family have been nominated. During the period 1986–95, Emma Thompson had a record four nominations, seven people from Merchant-Ivory films received nominations, and The Last Emperor (UK/Italy 1987) won all nine Oscars for which it was nominated.

Film Music

Film music

Though the first cinema films had no sound track, the early picture palaces were not silent. To blot out noise from the projector and the audience and also to create atmosphere, a piano, organ or band, sometimes with many instrumentalists, nearly always provided music. The music was often extemporized or adapted from a stock repertory, but was sometimes composed specially for the film. Increasingly ingenious attempts to replace live players by mechanically reproduced sound led in 1928 to the first talkies. Their sound track carried not only speech but also the film’s musical backing, though the orchestration had at first to make allowances for distortions inherent in early sound systems. By the mid-1980s, film music was developing as an essential part of cinematic art, not just in musicals and other films that more or less naturally called for music but also in productions of every sort from light comedy by way of the Westerns to heavy drama.

The vogue grew also for giving a film a ‘theme tune’, either a song or an instrumental motif that was given great prominence. In 1931–2 an Oscar was awarded for Best Sound Recording, but in 1934 there were Oscars for Best Song and Best Score. In Britain, Arthur Bliss composed the score for Korda’s film of H.G.Wells’ Things to Come; his example was followed by William Walton (The First of the Few, 1942, and Henry V, 1944). Ealing Studio’s Ernest Irving regularly commissioned leading British composers, such as Vaughan Williams (Scott of the Antarctic, 1948). Malcolm Arnold, with eighty film scores to his name, won an Oscar for his music for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Particularly when not foregrounded but used rather to help create mood, film music offers the composer opportunities for experiment both in musical forms and orchestral coloration. Like nineteenth-century composers who quarried orchestral works out of their incidental music for the theatre (for example, Georges Bizet’s Arlésienne suite (1872)), the earlier writers of film music often made concert arrangements of their scores. Today, CD versions of scores for successful films, such as John Horner’s music for Titanic, sell well. The use of music in radio and television parallels developments of film music, though generally (despite exceptions like Benjamin Britten’s score for a BBC adaptation of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone in 1939), on a more modest level.

Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones (1912-2002)
Chuck Jones is an American motion-picture animator, writer, director, and producer, known for his work on many classic animated films. Charles Martin Jones was born in Spokane, Washington. He moved to California when he was a child and at the age of 15 enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. After graduation, he worked at several animation studios and then, around 1933, went to work for Leon Schlesinger, whose studio produced animated films for Warner Bros. (and was purchased by Warner Bros. in 1944). At the studio he worked with animation directors Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, helping to shape the characters of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck. Promoted to director in 1938, Jones directed his first animated short film, The Night Watchman, that same year. His best-known contributions to Warner Bros. are the series of short films featuring the Road Runner and Coyote (created in 1949) and Pepé Le Pew (created in 1945).

After the Warner Bros. animation unit closed its doors in the early 1960s (it later reopened), Jones worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) on the “Tom and Jerry” series and other films, including a made-for-television special based on a Dr. Seuss tale, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which was first broadcast in 1966. He continued to work on special productions for Warner Bros. from time to time and to produce animation through his own company, Chuck Jones Enterprises.
Jones earned a reputation in Hollywood as a political liberal and an intellectual. In the early 1940s he helped organize a strike at the Walt Disney studio, and in the mid-1940s he began writing analytical articles on the subject of animation. Jones also volunteered his services as director of Hell Bent for Election (1944), a short film created at the United Productions of America (UPA) studio that supported the re-election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Three of Jones’s animated shorts received Academy Awards: For Scent-imental Reasons (1949), So Much for So Little (1949), and The Dot and the Line (1965). In 1992 his Bugs Bunny short What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, an honor accorded to only a small group of American motion pictures. In 1996 Jones received honorary life membership in the Directors Guild of America and an honorary Oscar for “the creation of classic cartoons and cartoon characters whose animated lives have brought joy to our real ones for more than half a century.”

VAMPIRE

Vampire are said to be humans who once cheated death by drinking the blood of others and must therefore continue to drink the blood of the living in order to remain immortal. Consequently, they are believed to have become creatures with supernatural powers, such as amazing strength and the ability to hypnotize potential victims. In some fictionalized accounts of vampires, these creatures can also fly, sometimes after turning into a bat. There has been no physical evidence that such creatures are real, and indeed most people believe that vampires are figments of the imagination whose characteristics are largely based on the vampire in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Some, however, insist that vampires are real creatures, who hunt alone or in bands that roam the streets of large cities looking for lone victims who will not be missed. These creatures, believers say, die when exposed to sunlight, cannot enter churches, and have an aversion to religious symbols such as crosses and to holy water. In addition, they are said to be repelled by garlic. (Some say that these things can kill a vampire, but others believe they only drive away a vampire.)

 During the 1970s there were several cases in London of people insisting to police that they had encountered vampires in cemeteries, and one man was so afraid of a vampire attack that he protected himself with a necklace of garlic—and accidentally choked to death when one of the garlic cloves somehow became lodged in his throat. Similar reports are still made today. Vampire lore goes back much further than the late nineteenth century, when Bram Stoker was writing, however. In ancient times, people sometimes reported seeing vampires. For example, the ancient Greeks spoke of there being numerous vampires on the island of Santorini (now Thera). Believers say that such early accounts are particularly credible because they predate vampire novels. Some scholars, however, argue that early stories about vampires—at least those that come from Western cultures—can be attributed to the fact that until modern times, people were sometimes accidentally placed in coffins before they had actually died, which resulted in documented cases of “dead” bodies rising from their coffins.