David Forrest and Sue Vice
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992620
- eISBN:
- 9781526132208
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992620.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on a period of extremely fruitful aesthetic production for Hines, in terms of the novels and screenplays that followed A Kestrel for a Knave. During the 1970s, Hines’s political ...
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This chapter focuses on a period of extremely fruitful aesthetic production for Hines, in terms of the novels and screenplays that followed A Kestrel for a Knave. During the 1970s, Hines’s political energies were directed towards considering the institutions and structures of life at a time of active struggle for workers’ rights. Thus industrial action is evident in his novel First Signs (1972), and the pair of Plays for Today The Price of Coal (1977) looks back at the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s even as it anticipates the catastrophic strike of 1984-5. 1973’s Play for Today Speech Day is an experimental play about the class-related implications of education and the dim prospects for school-leavers, his novel The Gamekeeper (1975) about class injustice in relation to private land-ownership. Tom Kite is an unproduced screenplay about the potential offered by football for a working-class man to escape his origins.Less
This chapter focuses on a period of extremely fruitful aesthetic production for Hines, in terms of the novels and screenplays that followed A Kestrel for a Knave. During the 1970s, Hines’s political energies were directed towards considering the institutions and structures of life at a time of active struggle for workers’ rights. Thus industrial action is evident in his novel First Signs (1972), and the pair of Plays for Today The Price of Coal (1977) looks back at the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s even as it anticipates the catastrophic strike of 1984-5. 1973’s Play for Today Speech Day is an experimental play about the class-related implications of education and the dim prospects for school-leavers, his novel The Gamekeeper (1975) about class injustice in relation to private land-ownership. Tom Kite is an unproduced screenplay about the potential offered by football for a working-class man to escape his origins.
David Forrest
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676392
- eISBN:
- 9780748693856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676392.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter seeks to locate Shane Meadows work within broader traditions of British social realism. With references to the British documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, the British New Wave ...
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This chapter seeks to locate Shane Meadows work within broader traditions of British social realism. With references to the British documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, the British New Wave cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the work of prominent realist directors such as Ken Loach, Meadows' films are explored in light of their similarities to and departures from established trends in British cinema. The chapter makes the case that Meadows and his contemporaries such as Andrea Arnold, Duane Hopkins, Pawel Pawlikowski, Samantha Morton and Joanna Hogg can be seen to move towards a more poetic form of realism that rejects didacticism and explicit explorations of social issues, in favour of a more ambiguous image-led narration. Contemporary British realism is characterised by a focus on young, marginalised protagonists searching for meaning in poetically charged urban and suburban environments. As such, the representation of landscape, space and place is a persistent source of interest within the films. Works from across Meadows' oeuvre are explored in relation to these areas, drawing parallels with the aesthetic and thematic emphases adopted by his contemporaries.Less
This chapter seeks to locate Shane Meadows work within broader traditions of British social realism. With references to the British documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, the British New Wave cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the work of prominent realist directors such as Ken Loach, Meadows' films are explored in light of their similarities to and departures from established trends in British cinema. The chapter makes the case that Meadows and his contemporaries such as Andrea Arnold, Duane Hopkins, Pawel Pawlikowski, Samantha Morton and Joanna Hogg can be seen to move towards a more poetic form of realism that rejects didacticism and explicit explorations of social issues, in favour of a more ambiguous image-led narration. Contemporary British realism is characterised by a focus on young, marginalised protagonists searching for meaning in poetically charged urban and suburban environments. As such, the representation of landscape, space and place is a persistent source of interest within the films. Works from across Meadows' oeuvre are explored in relation to these areas, drawing parallels with the aesthetic and thematic emphases adopted by his contemporaries.
David Forrest and Sue Vice
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992620
- eISBN:
- 9781526132208
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992620.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several ...
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This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several novels and screenplays which were never published or produced. We argue throughout that Hines’s best-known works are deservedly his 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, and the 1984 atomic-war drama Threads. Both works have become central elements of British cultural history, A Kestrel for a Knave for its portrait of a schoolboy who tries to transcend his limited circumstances, Threads for its powerful portrayal of ordinary lives and communities destroyed by a nuclear attack. Yet the poetic realism that characterizes these works is evident in the very wide range of other kinds of writing that Hines produced, over the forty years of his writing life. Hines’s other works draw on the themes that preoccupied him, including injustice and deprivation, in relation to fiction and scripts about coal-mining, landowners, football, education and gender, culminating in works that represented Britain as multicultural and post-industrial nation. We argue that Hines’s entire oeuvre is as deserving of attention as that given to his best-known works.Less
This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several novels and screenplays which were never published or produced. We argue throughout that Hines’s best-known works are deservedly his 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, and the 1984 atomic-war drama Threads. Both works have become central elements of British cultural history, A Kestrel for a Knave for its portrait of a schoolboy who tries to transcend his limited circumstances, Threads for its powerful portrayal of ordinary lives and communities destroyed by a nuclear attack. Yet the poetic realism that characterizes these works is evident in the very wide range of other kinds of writing that Hines produced, over the forty years of his writing life. Hines’s other works draw on the themes that preoccupied him, including injustice and deprivation, in relation to fiction and scripts about coal-mining, landowners, football, education and gender, culminating in works that represented Britain as multicultural and post-industrial nation. We argue that Hines’s entire oeuvre is as deserving of attention as that given to his best-known works.
Louise FitzGerald and Sarah Godfrey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676392
- eISBN:
- 9780748693856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676392.003.0011
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focusses on Meadows' television work, more specifically his television continuations of the film This is England with the Channel Four series This is England '86 and This is England '88. ...
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This chapter focusses on Meadows' television work, more specifically his television continuations of the film This is England with the Channel Four series This is England '86 and This is England '88. It discusses the series as both ‘event television’ and youth drama, their relationship with contemporaneous television dramas such as Shameless and Skins as well as the earlier work of television directors including Alan Clarke and Ken Loach. The chapter also foregrounds the importance of memory, not only personal but also historical and televisual, to the This is England corpus.Less
This chapter focusses on Meadows' television work, more specifically his television continuations of the film This is England with the Channel Four series This is England '86 and This is England '88. It discusses the series as both ‘event television’ and youth drama, their relationship with contemporaneous television dramas such as Shameless and Skins as well as the earlier work of television directors including Alan Clarke and Ken Loach. The chapter also foregrounds the importance of memory, not only personal but also historical and televisual, to the This is England corpus.
