Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

  • Author: Guy Westwell

Yorkshire: the birthplace of film?

Any assertions of ‘firsts’ in cinema are open invitations to rebuttal, but the BBC has recently broken news of a claim that the West Yorkshire city of Leeds was in fact film’s birthplace. Louis Le Prince, a French engineer who moved to Leeds in 1866, became one of a number of late 19th-century innovators entering the race to conceive, launch, and patent moving image cameras and projectors.

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The greatest film ever made!

What is the greatest film ever made? In an attempt to answer this question the editors of the British Film Institute’s journal Sight and Sound conducts a poll of leading film critics, scholars and directors. The first poll took place in 1952, when Vittorio De Sica’s Italian Neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) was declared the winner. Sixty years later, and with nearly 850 critics, scholars and programmers contributing, the results of the 2012 poll have just been published.

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