John Schlesinger

“I like the surprise of the curtain going up, revealing what’s behind it.” –John Schlesinger The British director John Schlesinger was one of the cinema’s most dynamic and influential artists. Now, in Conversations with John Schlesinger, acclaimed writer Ian Buruma, Schlesinger’s nephew, reveals the director’s private world in a series of in-depth interviews conducted in the later years of the director’s life. Here they discuss the impact of Schlesinger’s personal life on his art. As his films so readily demonstrate, Schlesinger is a wonderful storyteller, and he serves up fascinating and provocative recollections of growing up in a Jewish family during World War II, his sexual coming-of-age as a gay man in conformist 1950s England, his emergence as an artist in the “Swinging 60s,” and the roller-coaster ride of his career as one of the most prominent Hollywood directors of his time. Schlesinger also discusses his artistic philosophy and approach to filmmaking, recounting stories from the sets of his masterpieces, including Midnight Cowboy; Sunday, Bloody Sunday; Marathon Man; and The Day of the Locust. He shares what it was like to direct such stars as Dustin Hoffman, John Voight, Sean Penn, Madonna, and Julie Christie (whom Schlesinger is credited with discovering) and offers his thoughts on the fickle nature of fame and success in Hollywood. Packed with wit and keen insight into the artistic mind, Conversations with John Schlesinger is not just the candid story of a dynamic and eventful life but the true measure of an extraordinary person.

The city, with its manifold distractions and violence, its invitation to intoxication and dream, had long served to represent the experience of modernity in works of art at the time John Schlesinger made his acclaimed urban documentary ‘Terminus’ in 1961. To be a reader of the city was to be a reader of modern life, and Schlesinger was a discriminating, at times relentless, reader of the city throughout his career, especially in his three greatest films, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘The Day of the Locust’, set in New York, London and Los Angeles, respectively. His character-driven stories, evocation of the significance of the everyday, and insistence on ambiguities of situation and motive – all qualities he was known for – point to literary influences that reach back to the nineteenth century and earlier. ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ is not only the first book to fully acknowledge those influences, but also the first book to explicate the power of his art to capture the modern, urban experiences of becoming an adult in an atmosphere that relentlessly promotes fantasies of success and wealth; of coming to terms with one’s national identity in the context of international politics; and of attempting to transform the past, both personal and cultural, into a viable present.

Looks at the life and career of the British motion picture director of such films as "Midnight Cowboy" and "Marathon Man."

The great historical and economic transformations of the late twentieth-century city are vividly reflected in John Schlesinger's oeuvre. In films of the early sixties 'A Kind of Loving' and 'Billy Liar', the city was imagined as industrial and residential, with the characters confronting life on the local and familial level. In 'Darling', 'Midnight Cowboy' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', films made from 1965 to 1971, the city had become cosmopolitan, ruled over by international finance and riven by class tensions. And in two films of the eighties 'The Falcon and the Snowman' and 'Madame Sousatzka', Schlesinger was emphatic in showing the desperation with which youthful characters struggled to come of age, not in a local urban environment, but in a national and global one. The specific economic and political forces driving these urban changes have been extensively treated in the growing body of scholarship on the 'cinematic city'. While these forces form an important backdrop to 'The Films of John Schlesinger', the aim of the book overall is to demonstrate the centrality of Schlesinger's aesthetic imagination, but not as something divorced from political, moral and historical life. The distinguished British cinematographer Billy Williams once described Schlesinger as the 'most complete' director he ever worked with. Schlesinger combined a directorial 'eye' (mastery of camera movement, framing, editing, production design, etc.) with a profound literary sense (understanding of character and situation). He began his career with the award-winning documentary 'Terminus' (1961) and went on to make a total of seventeen feature films and five films for television. Several of his films had a genuinely innovative impact: Andy Warhol said that 'Midnight Cowboy' 'took a real drawing card from the underground' in the way it dealt with 'forbidden subjects'. Pauline Kael described 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' as 'a novel written on film' and, in being so, an entirely new achievement, 'instantly recognizable as a classic'. Other Schlesinger films are also of lasting interest: 'Billy Liar', reissued by Criterion in 2001, is a comic gem. 'The Day of the Locust' is taught in film schools today. Yet there is a dearth of intelligent conversation about these rich works. Contemporary reviews by leading film critics are insightful, as are selected articles and the sole full-length study of Schlesinger, which appeared years before his career ended. A full-scale 'interpretation' of what Schlesinger's oeuvre teaches us about modern life has yet to appear. Schlesinger's films have been undervalued for reasons that have little to do with their achievement: he fell out of favour in Hollywood, offended critics with his satire of American society and made a few relatively uninspired films just to keep working. The time is ripe for a revaluation of his oeuvre. 'The Films of John Schlesinger' engages the innovative content and form of the major films, and makes critical judgements identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It explores their major theme, which is the importance of survival, and of trying to make the best of what one has, particularly as this theme is played out in modern, urban society. It takes up different theories of film - that of Benjamin, Hansen and others - but it is not a theoretical analysis intended solely for academics.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources. In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.

Over half a century on, the 1960s continue to generate strong intellectual and emotional responses - both positive and negative - and this is no less true in the arena of film. Making substantial use of new and underexplored archive resources that provide a wealth of information and insight on the period in question, this book offers a fresh perspective on the major resurgence of creativity and international appeal experienced by British cinema in that dramatic decade. Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema is the first scholarly volume on this period of British cinema for more than twenty-five years. It provides a major reconsideration of the period by focusing on the central tensions and contradiction between novelty/revolution and continuity/tradition during what remains a highly contentious period of cultural production and consumption.

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