October 24 - December 7

Few directors have risen to David Lean’s status in cinema’s pantheon. Despite several exceptional, small-scale films made in the UK during the first half of his career, Lean’s oeuvre, more than that of any other director, has come to embody “larger-than-life” cinema. Lean habitually earns the highest praise; in a 2002 Sight & Sound poll of critics and directors, Lean finished at number nine on the list of favourite filmmakers, while Lawrence of Arabia ranked fourth on the list of favourite films. He has no shortage of support from critics (some of whom erroneously regard him as more craftsmen than auteur) and his films remain immensely popular with a surprising range of audiences who now happily have the opportunity to view them as they were meant to be seen, on the big screen, in this comprehensive retrospective featuring ten new prints, recently restored by the BFI.

British-born Lean (1908-1991), the son of an austere Quaker, was forbidden even to watch cinema until he was an adult, and entered the industry only after a dispiriting attempt at working as an accountant in his father’s office. He began doing menial work in the pre-sound cinema, acquainting himself with various aspects of film production. Lean considered this phase of his career to be an essential grounding in the craft of filmmaking. He went on to work as an assistant to Anthony Asquith, then as an assistant editor, before beginning what would become a career-long infatuation with the joy of editing. Lean cut several big British productions, including Pygmalion, and his (quickly acknowledged) expertise as an editor became essential to his conception of filmmaking. Lean stated: “I’m really still an editor at heart. I can’t keep my hands off the scissors. It’s a wonderful feeling, handling film, because for the first time, when the film is cut, when I start cutting the close-ups into the long shots and the close-ups against close-ups, and the many variations of this, you start to see if all the work you did as a director is, in fact, working.”

Often praised as the consummate craftsman, possessing unsurpassable technical knowledge of all facets of film production,