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The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter argues that documentary aesthetics turn to everyday life in order to create works that promoted the norms and values of the British liberal state during its period of greatest distress.

Introduction

Tom Ryall

in Anthony Asquith

This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various ... More

This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various directions taken by the British film during the period of his career, and he is regarded as one of the most underrated film directors in British film history. Although not ignored by scholars and critics, Asquith's work has certainly not had anything like the attention enjoyed by his most distinguished contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and neither has it had the consideration devoted to figures such as Michael Powell and David Lean. The selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture, and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.Less

The formative years

Tom Ryall

in Anthony Asquith

This chapter charts the topography of the British film industry in the 1920s, when Anthony Asquith began his film career. Asquith entered the film industry in the mid-1920s, towards the end of the ... More

This chapter charts the topography of the British film industry in the 1920s, when Anthony Asquith began his film career. Asquith entered the film industry in the mid-1920s, towards the end of the troubled silent period when the production industry in Britain was in decline in the face of competition from the American film. The industry struggled to find a position in the market and seemed to many on the brink of extinction. The 1928 Cinematograph Films Act effectively laid the foundations for a British production industry by, among other provisions, requiring exhibitors to screen a number of British films as part of their annual schedules. It was also a period marked by ‘a lively engagement with issues of film criticism and aesthetics’, which was stimulated in part by the new adventurous films from Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, and the Soviet Union. Tell England (1931), the much-delayed project about the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War, was to be Asquith's first sound film proper, though, as with Shooting Stars, he was to work in collaboration with another experienced figure. British Instructional had proved to be a congenial context for the start of a career in film making; the next phase of Asquith's career was to prove somewhat more problematic.Less

Post-war films 1 – genre and British cinema

Tom Ryall

in Anthony Asquith

This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the ... More

This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.Less

Resisting Colonial Gendering while Domesticating the Empire

Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Heather Norris Nicholson

in British Women Amateur Filmmakers: National Memories and Global Identities

This chapter examines how colonial women amateur filmmakers often documented in detail their early and mid-twentieth century overseas travel and settlement experiences, jobs, sports and private and ... More

This chapter examines how colonial women amateur filmmakers often documented in detail their early and mid-twentieth century overseas travel and settlement experiences, jobs, sports and private and official events. Relying on cross-archival primary sources, it discusses the filmmakers’ simultaneous roles as vectors of colonising credos and commodified subalterns of imperial paternalism. It explores the historical discourse present across several colonial amateur films made by British women in South Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the Middle East between 1920s and 1940s. It also considers gender and racial hierarchies as shaped by imperial rule while confirmed or challenged by the filmmakers' prevailing perceptions of cinematic vocabulary and practice. Although traditionally seen as a predominantly male hobby, amateur filmmaking across the British Empire has been a pastime preferred by women too, almost on par with their male counterparts. It thus becomes possible to speak of a gender-based visual narrative identifiable across British colonial amateur filmmaking, one validated by the thematic choices made by women amateur filmmakers and their shared visual literacy. Finally, the chapter explores the differences and similarities in visual literacy between several amateur films made by British colonial women during the final years of the British rule in India.Less

Dramas of Masculine Adjustment I: Tragic Melodramas

Alan Burton and Tim O'sullivan

in The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph

One of the key and consistent themes in the post-war films of Dearden and Relph concerned men forced to confront new circumstances and changed expectations. This chapter surveys eleven of their films ... More

One of the key and consistent themes in the post-war films of Dearden and Relph concerned men forced to confront new circumstances and changed expectations. This chapter surveys eleven of their films (1948 – 1970) that work in a diversity of genres settings and scenarios but that are distinguished by tragic, male narratives. These films result either in the death of the male protagonist or in his otherwise seriously compromised ending. These are not ‘social problem’ films as such, but they do address from multiple viewpoints, the contradictions and anxieties of men, dealing with and trying to face up to, the forces of personal, social and historical change.Less

British film production and the horror genre

Johnny Walker

in Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be ... More

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.Less

Single vessels and twisting ropes

B. F. Taylor

in The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency?

This chapter reconsiders the style and meaning of British New Wave cinema. The examination of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey or Billy Liar, is based upon the pressing desire to ... More

This chapter reconsiders the style and meaning of British New Wave cinema. The examination of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey or Billy Liar, is based upon the pressing desire to re-evaluate the mise-en-scène of these films. This has been achieved by applying the kind of British critical methodology, which first suggested that such an approach was unnecessary. The kind of style-based film criticism originally advocated by Movie is a useful tool for reconsidering the nature and the status of the series of films. Reconsidering the nature of each of these films is made possible by concentrating upon the details of each one and allowing a discussion of these details to develop a deeper understanding of each individual film. The implications of this are twofold. Firstly, it enables a clear demonstration that it is not the methodology that is at fault; it is just the way in which the methodology has (not) been applied. The strand of British film criticism which has developed is an impressive tool by which discussions of the British New Wave can be moved forward. The impressive nature of the methodology is further enhanced by the implications that such an approach has for other aspects of British cinema. Secondly, it is important to understand that examining the style and meaning of any individual film allows that film to have a position within any kind of broader framework.Less

A British Comparison

Zhou Xuelin

in Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

This chapter presents a sample comparative study of youth cultures. It compares and contrasts the British angry-young-man films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Chinese young-rebel films of ... More

This chapter presents a sample comparative study of youth cultures. It compares and contrasts the British angry-young-man films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Chinese young-rebel films of the 1980s. The British films include Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and This Sporting Life (Romulus, 1963). Drawing on the Western literature on youth rebellion, it compares the social history of the two countries in terms of structural similarities, and presents some general conclusions about the nature of youth rebellion and how it should best be understood within its particular national and historical contexts.Less

BRITAIN: Meet Mr Lucifer: British Cinema Under the Spell of Tv

Graham Roberts and Heather Wallis

in European Cinemas in the Television Age

In 1953 Ealing Studios made Meet Mr Lucifer; produced by Michael Balcon, directed by Anthony Pelissier and starring Stanley Holloway, the latter of whom appeared as Hollingsworth, an actor who is ... More

In 1953 Ealing Studios made Meet Mr Lucifer; produced by Michael Balcon, directed by Anthony Pelissier and starring Stanley Holloway, the latter of whom appeared as Hollingsworth, an actor who is playing Lucifer in a repertory theatre pantomime. Meet Mr Lucifer's combination of contempt and fear is illustrative of the British film industry's attitude to television – a reaction notably different to that seen in post-war USA, where ‘the industry monitored developments closely and manoeuvred to get in on the ground floor of the new medium’. The big difference between the US and UK film industry responses to TV is that it took many years for the British film companies to catch on to the opportunities it presented, by which time the terms of trade could be set by the TV companies.Less

Bathed in the Fading Light

Michael Koresky

in Terence Davies

This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and ... More

This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.Less

Edmund Meisel’s “Visual Sound” in The Crimson Circle (1929): The Case of the Vanishing Part-Talkie

Fiona Ford

in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain

In August 1929, British Talking Pictures released a part-talking feature called The Crimson Circle. This early British sound feature was a re-working of the German silent film Der rote Kreis ... More

In August 1929, British Talking Pictures released a part-talking feature called The Crimson Circle. This early British sound feature was a re-working of the German silent film Der rote Kreis (directed by Friedrich Zelnik in 1928). Recorded using a sound-on-disc process, the rejuvenated Crimson Circle had dialogue sections (directed by Sinclair Hill) interspersed within a synchronised soundtrack of music and sound effects devised by the Austrian composer Edmund Meisel, notorious for his propulsive accompaniment to the German release of Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1926). Neither the print nor the discs from The Crimson Circle are known to survive, but aspects of the lost soundtrack can be glimpsed from surviving documentary evidence and by comparison with Meisel’s extant film scores and soundtracks.Less

Straight lines and rigid readings: Arthur Seaton and the arc of flight

B. F. Taylor

in The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency?

This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) ... More

This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) sitting on a hill overlooking a new estate that is being built. The film actually closes with him and Doreen walking down the hill leaving audiences with a question that what happens to them in the future. John Hill reaches a conclusion, what he calls the ‘new wave’ narrative. Hill reaches this conclusion by drawing on Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the passage in a narrative ‘from one equilibrium to another’. This passage begins with a stable situation that is disturbed and thus becomes ‘a state of disequilibrium’. Eventually, the original equilibrium is restored but now it is somehow different from the original situation. For Hill, the narrative of a film such as Reisz's loosely adheres to this model, with the film's central disturbance ‘usually a socially or sexually transgressive desire’. Moreover, as Hill continues, this movement from disequilibrium to a new equilibrium is not random but patterned in terms of a linear chain of events.Less

Gangland UK

Paul Elliott

in Studying the British Crime Film

This chapter discusses the British gangster film. Unlike the vaguely romantic and detached violence of the Tommy-gun toting mobster, the British gangster of the 1940s fought with razors, vitriol and ... More

This chapter discusses the British gangster film. Unlike the vaguely romantic and detached violence of the Tommy-gun toting mobster, the British gangster of the 1940s fought with razors, vitriol and fists, at once a more prosaic and more hands-on method of violence — a reality that was reflected in the cinema. From its beginnings in the post-war period to the epic violence of The Long Good Friday (1979), the British gangster film has always adapted itself to the surrounding social milieu. Very often it has none of the mythic quality of its Hollywood counterpart and is certainly lacking in the budget or the star names. However, it also avoids the sentimentality of the Hollywood film and, aside from a few exceptions, tends to resist the glamorisation of its violence. Death in the British gangster film is brutal and ugly and retribution is often quick.Less

The Formative Period: The War Years and the Ethos of Ealing

Alan Burton and Tim O'sullivan

in The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph

This chapter surveys the inauguration and early development of Dearden and Relph's partnership at Ealing and examines their first five films together; from The Bells Go Down (1943) to The Captive ... More

This chapter surveys the inauguration and early development of Dearden and Relph's partnership at Ealing and examines their first five films together; from The Bells Go Down (1943) to The Captive Heart (1946). It emphasises that they rapidly embraced and cemented their partnership within the Ealing wartime ethos of ‘quiet heroism’ and team work under Michael Balcon's studio management and direction. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that they made their distinctive mark in Ealing's projection of Britain during this time of national, wartime crisis and proved themselves considerable, but understated talents at the studio in the period.Less

‘It’s Alive!’ The Birth of Home-Grown Horror

Ian Cooper

in Frightmares: A History of British Horror Cinema

The chapter discusses how the interest in British horror films grew at a slow pace. It mentions that there was an enormous popularity of imported American horror films and that this led to a certain ... More

The chapter discusses how the interest in British horror films grew at a slow pace. It mentions that there was an enormous popularity of imported American horror films and that this led to a certain amount of unease in the UK, especially at the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter talks about the creation of the H (for Horror) and the restrictive X certificate. It discusses the fascination with orientalism and the exotic, and how it recurs throughout the horror films. The chapter also discusses The Cinematograph Act of 1927 which established an exhibition quota for British films with the aim of boosting home-grown production. It analyses how it had the unintentional effect of widening the gap even further between prestige pictures and what would in the US be called B movies or low-budget comedies, thrillers and comedy thrillers. It then reviews the influence of slaughter on British horror. The chapter discusses the struggles that the horror genre had to go through and how film makers had to sneak horror into comedies and thrillers in the 1930s.Less

Introduction: Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Paul Elliott

in Studying the British Crime Film

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the British crime film, which is always a symbiosis of British sensibility and foreign (usually Hollywood) cinematic conventions. British crime ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the British crime film, which is always a symbiosis of British sensibility and foreign (usually Hollywood) cinematic conventions. British crime cinema is obviously heavily influenced by foreign cultures; however, it is also inevitably shaped by indigenous histories and traditions. Crime film per se can be traced back to a variety of literary sources including detective fiction, Gothic writing, and gallows biographies like the Newgate calendar, eighteenth-century chronicles that detailed the crimes of those condemned to swing in Newgate prison. In recent times, this has extended into the impact of Brutalist architecture on the collective consciousness of the nation, the influence of political figures like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair on public morality, and the prevalence of media images of contemporary folk devils such as the ‘hoodie’ and the juvenile delinquent. None of these things may be specific to Britain but their combined character shapes and characterises its cultural outputs. The history of the British crime film, then, is dispersed throughout a plurality of other histories and traditions and the same could be said for scholarly work concerned with it.Less

Juvenile Delinquency

Paul Elliott

in Studying the British Crime Film

This chapter explores British delinquency films. The phrase ‘juvenile delinquent’ has been used to describe criminal children since the mid-nineteenth century. Although an endlessly prescient and ... More

This chapter explores British delinquency films. The phrase ‘juvenile delinquent’ has been used to describe criminal children since the mid-nineteenth century. Although an endlessly prescient and emotive area, the subject of the juvenile delinquent represents both continuity and change for British society and cinema — on the one hand offering an ever present folk devil and barometer for social mores and, on the other, lending a constantly evolving image that forever allies itself to other problems. It also offers special insight into how successive generations view themselves and their successors. The first manifestation of the juvenile delinquent in British films could be thought to be characters such as Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock (2010) or Ted Peters in Dancing with Crime (1947). However, it would not be until the 1950s and 1960s that the British juvenile delinquent made a full appearance on film and then it would always be under the watchful eyes of a responsible adult. The chapter then considers Lewis Gilbert's Cosh Boy (1953) and Basil Dearden's Violent Playground (1958), as well as the films Scum (1979), Made in Britain (1982), and Scrubbers (1983).Less

Dramas of Masculine Adjustment II: Men in Action

Alan Burton and Tim O'sullivan

in The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph

By comparison with those films based around the tragic male melodrama, this chapter investigates a small number of films that Dearden and Relph made in the 1950s which examined men's adjustment to ... More

By comparison with those films based around the tragic male melodrama, this chapter investigates a small number of films that Dearden and Relph made in the 1950s which examined men's adjustment to the loss of (war-time) action. These films seek to recreate aspects of male solidarity, purpose and experience, but within changed, peace-time circumstances. Crime and criminality is often the result, but it is ultimately shown not to pay.Less