World-renowned film historian, curator, broadcaster and consultant Ian Christie will be in Malta to deliver a lecture about the film industry and its local potential. Gloria Lauri-Lucente picks his brain about his favourite topics.

He has written and edited books on early cinema, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam and has worked on exhibitions ranging from Twilight of the Tsars (Hayward, 1991) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006).

Ian Christie is one of the most respected names in the film industry and his writings have inspired countless up-and-coming film-makers. Currently serving on the UK Screen Heritage Programme Board and adviser to the London Film Museum, he will be sharing his expertise with the Maltese film-loving public during a lecture tomorrow.

Referring to your article in the November 2013 issue of Sight and Sound, titled ‘The peak of silent cinema’, you write that silent cinema is being rediscovered after years of neglect. You then go on to provide a list of 15 key films from the latter part of the 1920s, which you qualify as a “personal choice” that required some “agonising” on your part.

How agonising was it for you to exclude such great films as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Buster Keaton’s The General and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Making film lists is always a kind of game, where you have to invent your own rules, otherwise you’d spend weeks agonising.

Sight & Sound does a 10 best poll every decade, which I’ve commented on over the last 30 years, so I’ve read a lot of lists!

In this case, I thought it would be more useful to avoid some of the obvious suspects – which don’t need my endorsement since they’re very well known – and concentrate instead on films that are great but unfashionable, or just little-known today.

For example, how many people realise that there were some extraordinary Japanese silents, one of which, A Page of Madness, was actually a kind of underground hit in the 1970s? Or how about Laurel and Hardy, two of the great comedians who managed the transition from silent to sound without much drama, but have been rather unfairly squeezed out by the reputations of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in recent years?

Would you go as far as Fredric Jameson, who claims that there are two distinct film histories, silent and sound, of which the former is a far more superior and sophisticated cultural form than the latter?

I’m not totally sure what Fred means by that, since the crossover was really a period in film history in its own right.

But I’d say this kind of distinction is one based on the fact that silents were relatively unknown until recently, so they tend to be rediscovered as something rich and strange.

But the great festivals of silent-era film – both in Italy, in Pordenone and Bologna – have done a lot to break down this sense of strangeness.

After a week in Pordenone, watching only films accompanied by piano, you’re tuned in, and it’s dialogue films that feel odd.

You also realise that there were as many duds in the silent era as there are today, so I’d resist the view that silent is best, even though it produced cinema’s first great masterpieces.

What do current film-makers have to learn from the great masters of the silent era?

Humility, simplicity, boldness… I could go on. When I teach at our National Film and Television School, I try to convey to students that old films aren’t primitive and that much of what they want to do today was already being done – although it has to be re-invented for every era.

In ‘The peak of silent cinema’, you say it was synchronised film that made the earlier films silent, just as colour would later on make other films black and white. Can you elaborate?

We seriously lack vision and enterprise among film-makers, to make 3D cinema a real attraction

Well, obviously, films weren’t considered silent when this was the norm, but they became so after the Talkies made them seem old-fashioned. Black and white versus colour is more complicated, since there was always colour of some kind for a minority of films, while the normal majority were, in fact, black and white. Actually, I think something interesting is happening today, when silent and black and white are becoming stylistic options – even on our cameraphones – so young people are perhaps more open to them as alternatives to normal, synchronised sound and colour.

I would now like to turn to 3D. Do you think its life is shortlived or does it have a real future?

The 3D illusion is actually older than film and even older than photography. It was first demonstrated in 1838, using drawn images, but really took off when photography made immersive 3D imaging possible in the 1850s.

Interestingly, most of the film pioneers assumed that moving pictures would soon be in 3D, but it proved hard to project reliably, and all throughout the 20th century, it was cinema operators who resisted – not the public.

Then came Avatar and with it came digital 3D, which is now installed in a large proportion of the world’s cinemas. But I think we seriously lack vision and enterprise among film-makers, to make 3D cinema a real attraction – James Cameron, Wim Wenders and Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) excepted – and we do need to get rid of the glasses, which should be possible.

You have taken issue with those detractors of 3D projection who claim 3D viewing is a physiologically unnatural process that has imposed new perceptual demands that may trigger discomfort, such as headaches in the viewer. How important do you think is the work of vision researchers in our understanding of the neural processing involved in 3D image consumption?

I’m sure that 3D deniers are just parading their prejudice – and they remind me of those who said ‘we don’t need talking films’ back in the 1920s. Vision scientists confirm that 3D can cause some eye strain and visual fatigue if it’s poorly configured and that there is a proportion of the population who, unfortunately, just can’t experience it. But for the majority, it’s absolutely fine and it certainly won’t do your eyes or your brain any damage.

Like all the new electronic devices and systems we’ve got accustomed to over the last 15 years, it takes some getting used to, but the results can really open a new era in screen entertainment. As you can tell, I’m a 3D optimist!

The real issue is having access to a wider range of what’s out there, and not being forced to watch just what Hollywood wants you to see

You have praised Martin Scorsese for having paid an “elegiac tribute” in Hugo to the film pioneer Georges Méliès in digital 3D. Why do you think digital stereoscopy was an ingenious choice for this particular film?

Scorsese is well known to be a great film history enthusiast. I was present when he showed his own print of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels to the cast and crew of The Aviator, in preparation for what they were going to recreate.

I’m sure the attraction of Hugo for him was to bring Méliès alive for a new audience. Making it 3D – as Méliès the magician would certainly have enjoyed doing – was an inspired idea, because I think it helps today’s viewers recapture the sense of wonder the first audiences had when they watched these poetic fantasies full of impossible visual tricks.

We’ve seen so much digital trickery in recent cinema that I think viewers have become blasé, but Scorsese managed to make Méliès seem magical again.

You have worked extensively on Scorsese as well as Michael Powell. Why do you think Powell’s Peeping Tom seems to have a more profound impact on Scorsese than Black Narcissus, which may be described as a pinnacle of synaesthetic cinema? Do you think that such a predilection is determined by the fact that Peeping Tom deals with “the danger of film-making”, as Scorsese himself claims in the Foreword to your book Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger?

Scorsese knew about Peeping Tom’s reputation as a kind of underground movie when he was a film student in New York. But he didn’t see it until later, some time in the early 1970s. You can see its influence on the urban sleaze of Taxi Driver and the dangerous fantasy life that Robert De Niro’s character is living. So yes, Scorsese undoubtedly identified with the danger that’s the subject of Peeping Tom, but also with the risk that Powell ran by making it.

The irony is that the scandal surrounding Peeping Tom more or less sank Powell’s career, while Taxi Driver lifted Scorsese to a new level. And that was when he actually met Powell and began helping to make his work better known, which was what brought us together. I asked Scorsese to write the foreword to my Powell-Pressburger book, which was something he’d never done before. It was Powell who then suggested turning interviews with Scorsese into a book.

In a lecture you recently delivered at the British Academy, you described film as a ubiquitous phenomenon that permeates our lives. What is the place of film in our lives?

Film is all around us today, isn’t it? On tablets and smartphones when we’re travelling, on computers and on television – which is actually where most film is watched.

Screenings in cinemas only account for about six per cent of total viewings, although those are important for establishing a film’s reputation and later earnings. I can understand some people arguing that a cinema is the right place to watch a film, but I also think we’ve become quite good at choosing where and when we want to watch films. And, as one contributor to a book I edited on Audiences wrote: no one asks you where and how you read a novel.

So I think it’s time to accept that film is as pervasive as prose, but the real issue is having access to a wider range of what’s out there and not being forced to watch just what Hollywood wants you to see.

You have been invited to deliver a public lecture called ‘You mean we could shoot it all in Malta How production design shapes screen worlds’. Can you give us a sneak preview?

I’m sure the large range of films and TV programmes that have filmed in Malta is well known to most Maltese people, but it’s something I only became aware of when I started to take a close interest in production design about 10 years ago.

I wrote a book about John Box, who worked on Malta Story at the beginning of his career and went on to win four Oscars for films like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Man For All Seasons. This taught me a lot about dressing one place to look like another, which is often what happens in filming on Malta, and about the interplay between location and studio in filmmaking.

So I’ll be exploring some of these issues in my lecture – and hoping to get some local colour from the audience.

Gloria Lauri-Lucente is head of the Department of Italian and deputy dean of the Faculty of Arts. Ian Christie will be delivering his lecture at the Aula Magna, University of Malta, Valletta Campus, St Paul’s Street, Valletta, at 6.30pm. The event is being organised by the University of Malta’s Faculty of Arts. Prof .Christie will be available to chat with the audience over refreshments after the lecture. Entrance is free. For more information call 2340 2309 or e-mail yanica.cassar@um.edu.mt.