Oh Danny Boyle

From his earliest work as producer on Alan Clarke's hugely influential 1989 film Elephant onwards, Danny Boyle has never failed to stir up the oftentimes deadeningly dull world of British film drama, usually with his flamboyant visual and sonoric inventiveness. So, after all the digital and other ink spilled on his latest 'rags to riches' movie Slumdog Millionaire, Film Studies For Free keenly felt its duty to set out a little list of its favourite online studies of the storytelling techniques and filmmaking context of the ebulliently multicultural, but also very (Northern-)English director Boyle:

• David Bordwell, 'Slumdogged by the past', Observations of film art and FILM ART, February 1, 2009


• Bert Cardullo, 'Fiction into film, or bringing Welsh to a Boyle', Literature/Film Quarterly, 1997


• Peet Gelderblom, 'Sunshine and the Cinematic Experience', The House Next Door, May 16, 2007


• Miguel Mera, 'Reap What You Sow: "Perfect Day" [Lou Reed, 1973] / Trainspotting [Danny Boyle, in Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin (eds), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005) Limited Preview on Google Books


• Alexander Linklater, 'Danny Boyle Profile', The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009 (includes 'In the Director's Chair - Danny Boyle talks to Jason Solomons' video interview - 9min 41sec)
• Hannah Rothschild, 'Labour of Love' [on Boyle's debt to Film4], excerpt from the book Channel 4 at 25 (BFI, 2008)


• Murray Smith, 'The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion', [primarily on music in Trainspotting], 16:9, November 2006


• Karina M. Totah, 'Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles', Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2004 Issue 44


• Rachel Whitaker, 'Danny Boyle’s Daylight Dream [on Slumdog Millionaire]', The Oxonian Review, Issue 8.2, 2 February, 2009
• Also see: Danny Boyle biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline website.
• And Alan Bacchus's very useful career overview, 'The Cinema of Danny Boyle' (illustrated with lots of video clips) at the Daily Film Dose blog (November 16, 2008)