At BFI Southbank in April 2011
To mark the centennial year of the birth of highly regarded dramatist and screenwriter Terence Rattigan, BFI Southbank mounts the only celebratory season focusing on Rattigan’s output for film. Throughout April 2011 audiences will have the opportunity of seeing a selection of his varied screen output including Brighton Rock (1945),The Browning Version (1951) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). Rattigan expert and biographer Michael Darlow will, on April 13 also present an extended introduction to the screening of Journey Together (1945) and will investigate why film screenwriters are generally accorded less respect than theatrical dramatists.
From the 1940s until his death in 1977 Terence Rattigan was one of the most successful screenwriters in the world. He wrote more than 20 films and was twice nominated for an Oscar (for both Separate Tables (1958) and Breaking the Sound Barrier 1952). He wrote screen adaptations of his own stage plays, original screenplays and adaptations of work by others.
Throughout his career Rattigan’s film work alternated between projects which he found creatively exciting and those he regarded as well-paid chores and a means of sustaining his extravagant lifestyle. Rattigan ended an article he penned in 1950 by protesting at the extravagant critical respect accorded to film directors by reminding fellow screenwriters that ‘drama is inference, and inference drama’. He challenged them to ‘remember that the screenplay is the child not only of its mother, the silent film, but also of its father, the Drama; that it has affinities not only with Griffith and de Mille, but also with Sophocles, Shakespeare and Ibsen’.
Through this season BFI hopes to show that in their use of inference and dramatic understatement, Rattigan’s films remain every bit as true, moving and powerful as films made today. That, when so much that we see on our screens is over-obvious, overstated or simply empty, Rattigan’s words remain as pertinent as when he wrote them over 60 years ago.
