The Essay

Journalist and author Susan McKay returns to Londonderry to explore what 'City of Culture' status has meant to the place of her birth. Known as both Derry and Londonderry, the walled city became the inaugural UK City of Culture in 2013, and Susan examines what rebranding and reimagining has meant to a place that endured some of the worst episodes of the 'troubles' throughout her school days. As it...

What happens when cinema shuts up? Matthew Sweet explores those moments when the talkie stops talking and cuts the music dead: the final minutes of William Wyler's Roman Holiday; the heist in Rififi; Oliver Hardy's long despairing look into the camera lens. He also listens hard to those cinematic sounds being silenced by digital technology from the fizz of a reel-change to the wear and tear on a f...

The writer and film critic David Thomson explores how film composers create mood and how the best music evokes a place beyond reality.

The American academic and social critic Camille Paglia on the film scores which have inspired her since childhood including the work of Bernard Herrmann, John Dankworth and Max Steiner.

The novelist Jonathan Coe explores how a joint concert with Arthur Honegger led to the composer Miklós Rózsa writing for film, including the scores for 'Ben-Hur', 'Spellbound' and 'The Lost Weekend'.

The live music and sound effects, the unruly audiences, the performers paid to interpret mysterious foreign intertitles, the usherettes spraying the audience with disinfectant. Matthew Sweet explores the sound-world of cinema's beginnings, from the orchestras of big-budget epics to the small improvising bands of the fleapits - and discovers how their ghosts haunt the modern cinemagoing experience....

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, writer A L Kennedy contemplates the inconveniences of love in the 1945 Powell and Pressburger romance 'I Know Where I'm Going!', set on a remote Scottish island. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Sho...

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, Ian Christie on the 1943 Powell and Pressburger film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film that has been called Britain's answer to Citizen Kane. Ian Christie knew Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger well, and was instrumental in bringing their films to a new audience in the 1980s. Here he looks at their unusual relationship through one of their great...

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war. In Heffer on British Film, he puts the case for five films from the decade after the war which show British cinema dealing with gritty social issues and dramatic high standards before the...

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war. The cinema of the 30s was nakedly and unashamedly escapist in a way that the cinema of the late 40s and early 50s - in an age of lost innocence and social upheaval - simply couldn't be. T...

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war. The cinema of the 30s was nakedly and unashamedly escapist in a way that the cinema of the late 40s and early 50s - in an age of lost innocence and social upheaval - simply couldn't be. T...

The cinema of the 30s was nakedly and unashamedly escapist in a way that the cinema of the late 40s and early 50s - in an age of lost innocence and social upheaval - simply couldn't be. This was a period when British cinema was forced to embrace change and reflect reality. Taboos it had left untouched could no longer be ignored if film was to remain relevant. Families had broken up because of bere...

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war. In this first programme Heffer explores the Britain depicted by director Robert Hamer in what he describes as his 'stunning film noir' "It Always Rains on Sunday". "The period between 194...

In the final essay of this series, Mike Figgis reflects on the lessons he learned while working on big studio films in Hollywood and on how those experiences shaped his own approach to directing. Mike Figgis is an Academy Award nominated film director, writer, and composer. His films include, Suspension of Disbelief (2013), Love Live Long (2008), Cold Creek Manor (2003), Hotel (2001), Miss Julie (...

Josie Rourke, the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse, reminds us that working in theatre isn't always plain sailing. In her essay, she looks at what happens when disaster strikes and things go wrong. It's in these situations that a director is truly tested. Josie Rourke trained with directors Peter Gill, Michael Grandage, Nicholas Hytner, Phyllida Lloyd and Sam Mendes. Before coming to the...

Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher explores how a director must search for the play's 'inward sound' when creating theatre. Bartlett Sher has been nominated four times for the Tony Award, winning it in 2009 for the Broadway revival of South Pacific. Sher was previously the Artistic Director at the Intiman Playhouse in Seattle and is now Resident Director at the Lincoln Centre in New York. H...

In the second of five essays, the theatre director Emma Rice explores the role of the director as storyteller, and elaborates on the undertaking that transforms a text into a fully-fledged production. Emma Rice is the Joint Artistic Director of Kneehigh Theatre. For Kneehigh, she has directed for The Red Shoes (2002 Theatrical Management Association [TMA] Theatre Award for Best Director); The Wood...

In the first essay of the series, Roger Michell reflects on the mix of emotion he feels on the first day of any production, and beckons us to follow as he travels to the location of his 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson. A James Cameron film. A Rupert Goold production. The director has become an acclaimed and authoritative figure - even a star in his own right - but the job itself remains the subject...

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have lea...

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have lea...

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have lea...

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have lea...

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have lea...

Wagner and Adorno Professor John Deathridge explores the posthumous reputation of Wagner in the 20th Century as seen through the lens of the philosopher Theodor Adorno who had pertinent things to say about Wagner's appropriation by the fascists, his infamous anti-semitism, and the related issues of German culture post-World War 2, the culture industry and mass culture in general.

Wagner and Nietzsche Michael Tanner looks at the relationship between two titans of German culture, the 55-year old composer Richard Wagner and the precocious 24-year old philologist, who was destined to become the great philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Out of their heady late-night chats about Schopenhauer, Euripedes and Socrates came Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spiri...