Download e-book for iPad: Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean by Gene D. Phillips

Two-time Academy Award winner Sir David Lean (1908–1991) was once the most popular administrators of the 20th century, answerable for the classics The Bridge at the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and health professional Zhivago (1965). British-born Lean asserted himself in Hollywood as an important filmmaker along with his epic storytelling and panoramic visions of historical past, yet he began as a skilled movie editor and director in nice Britain. for that reason, he introduced an art-house mentality to blockbuster motion pictures. Combining components of biography and picture feedback, past the Epic: The lifestyles and flicks of David Lean makes use of screenplays and creation histories to evaluate Lean's physique of labor. writer Gene D. Phillips interviews actors who labored with Lean and administrators who knew him, and their reviews exhibit new information about the director's lifestyles and profession. Phillips additionally explores Lean's lesser-studied movies, resembling The Passionate neighbors (1949), Hobson's selection (1954), and Summertime (1955). the result's an in-depth exam of the director in cultural, historic, and cinematic contexts. Lean's method of filmmaking was once a ways assorted than that of a lot of his contemporaries. He selected his movies conscientiously and, accordingly, directed simply 16 movies in a interval of greater than 40 years. these movies, in spite of the fact that, became a number of the landmarks of motion-picture background. Lean is better identified for his epics, yet Phillips additionally specializes in Lean's profitable variations of well-known works of literature, together with retellings of performs resembling short come across (1945) and novels corresponding to nice expectancies (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), and A Passage to India (1984). From expansive reports of battle and strife to a few of literature's maximum excessive comedies and family dramas, Lean imbued all of his movies together with his particular inventive imaginative and prescient. Few administrators can fit Lean's skill to mix narrative sweep and mental aspect, and Phillips is going past Lean's epics to bare this unifying attribute within the director's physique of labor. past the Epic is an important review of a very good director's inventive procedure and his position within the movie industry.