British rural landscapes on film

Paul Newland

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526104694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

British rural landscapes on film offers insights into how rural areas in Britain have been represented on film, from the silent era, through both world wars, and on into the twenty-first century. It is the first book to exclusively deal with representations of the British countryside on film. The contributors demonstrate that the countryside has provided Britain (and its constituent nations and regions) with a dense range of spaces in which cultural identities have been (and continue to be) worked through. British rural landscapes on film demonstrates that British cinema provides numerous examples of how national identity and the identity of the countryside have been partly constructed through filmic representation, and how British rural films can allow us to further understand the relationship between the cultural identities of specific areas of Britain and the landscapes they inhabit.

1

Silent landscapes: rural settings, national identity and British silent cinema

Andrew Higson

Landscape and national cinema

Since the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, landscape has played a crucial role in the development of British national cinema. A sense of national specificity in British films has been asserted in part through the representation of particular types of place, and through presenting such places in particular ways. From short scenic films in the late 1890s and early 1900s to the heritage films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the representation of a particular version of traditional, rural England and the display of particular types of rural landscapes has been central to the articulation of national identity in British films. And of course it is a particular version of England and Englishness that has held sway in some of the most prominent understandings of British cinema.¹

In this chapter, I offer some reflections on the use of rural landscapes in British films of the silent period, and the ways in which those films and their landscapes were promoted and taken up in contemporary critical debate.² These reflections will touch on the role of landscape in articulating national identity and on the centrality of the concept of the picturesque in the film culture of the period. It will also become clear that, in contemporary critical debate, picturesque Englishness is very often seen as synonymous with high-quality photography. It is also worth remarking that 1895 saw not only the first public performances of films but also the foundation of that key British institution, the National Trust, known at the time as the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. To put it another way, the debates about and the development of British cinema in this period were by no means taking place in a vacuum.

In what follows, I will draw on examples from the late 1890s to the late 1920s, and from fiction and non-fiction films alike. Cecil Hepworth, one of the leading British filmmakers of the silent period, will inevitably figure large in my account, since his work was central to the critical debate of the period about landscape, British cinema and national identity.³ Thus, in 1912, Frederick Talbot noted of the Hepworth Company that it produced ‘some of the best films prepared especially to suit British and Colonial tastes’.⁴ What contemporary commentators particularly appreciated was the company’s ‘unsurpassed skill in the representation of typically English scenes’ and the ‘delicacy of touch and the beauty of [the] countryside settings’ of so many of its films.⁵ Of the 1916 version of Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, for instance, the Bioscope remarked that it had ‘never seen a film which embodied more thoroughly the true inner spirit, as well as the outward appearance, of the English countryside’.⁶ Of the 1919 film Broken Threads, The Cinema commented: ‘It makes one proud that a British producer can record for the screen such typical homeland scenery, that shown at home will make many a heart thrill with pride, whilst shown abroad will give the foreigner a true conception of our country’s beauty.’⁷ Indeed, as Hepworth himself remarked in his autobiography, ‘it was always in my mind from the very beginning that I was to make English pictures, with all the English countryside for background and with English atmosphere and English idiom throughout’.⁸

These are typical of the terms in which landscape in British films was discussed at the time: an un-self-conscious sense of what was typically English (rather than British), a sense that the English countryside was at its best naturally beautiful (although the concept of the picturesque, rather than the formally beautiful, is probably more appropriate here), and a sense that, for many commentators, the best British films were able to present such countryside scenes in an aesthetically pleasing manner that could be described as ‘delicate’. All of this was bound up in a concept of national identity in which tradition played a central role.

The early development of British cinema: storytelling versus pictorialism

In a discussion of aesthetic developments more generally in British films of the early 1910s, the renowned historian of British cinema Rachael Low suggests that there were in fact two distinct lines of development, each with their own more or less well-formulated theories and advocates. On the one hand, there was the line that stressed the role of the scenario writer and which therefore concentrated on the construction of the narrative, continuity, efficiency and cohesiveness – and, above all, comprehensibility. This we might call the classic narrative tendency. On the other hand there was the line that stressed the importance of pictorial composition, less in terms of relevance to the story than in terms of realism and beauty, and more or less static concepts of image construction such as ‘grouping’.⁹ This we might call the pictorialist tendency. We might see the former as an attempt to decisively move on from the stage of the cinema of attractions, while the latter recognises the continuing visual appeal of those attractions and is more overt about the processes of integrating the pleasures of the scenic and the travelogue, the theatrical tableau and the lantern image, with the pleasures of the extended dramatic narrative.

Low suggests that the distinction between the different tendencies can be illustrated by Barker and Haldane’s East Lynne (1913), which she sees benefiting from a well-constructed scenario, and the Hepworth/Bentley production of David Copperfield (1913), which is full of beautiful pictorial compositions. The distinction is not hard and fast, of course, and indeed both films were discussed at the time in terms of the discourses of realism and authenticity, Englishness and landscape.

Both films were made in 1913 and contributed to a sense that there had been a turnaround in the quality of British films that year. In response, one of the two leading British trade papers of the period, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, proclaimed that ‘the All-British film is rapidly coming into its own’. East Lynne was a key film in this development: ‘the staging, photography and acting of the film … are all perfect, and on every hand the film is being spoken of as the best yet turned out by an English firm’.¹⁰ Similar accolades were heaped on three Hepworth productions of 1913: Drake’s Love Story (‘this very fine production’¹¹), David Copperfield (‘the finest cinematograph film ever made by a British producer’¹²) and Hamlet (‘no finer film has ever been screened’¹³). All in all, it could be claimed that:

There is a marked increase in the respect with which English film productions are regarded in these days. Since East Lynne, Waterloo, and now Ivanhoe, we have heard remarkably little of the impossibility of getting good photographic results with the English climate. Still more remarkable is the absence of the once almost universal state of mind which led to condemnation of an English film because it was English – sometimes without even the form of inspection.¹⁴

As will be evident, several of these notable films were adaptations of canonical literary texts, bio-pics of national heroes or re-enactments of key moments in the national past. Such subject matter was not insignificant to those making claims for a turnaround in the fortunes of British cinema:

The charge against British manufacturers that they have allowed their national history and literature to be adapted for the cinematograph by foreign producers in other lands has often been heard, and has, up to the present, been partially justified. Latterly, however, our own manufacturers, in spite of overpowering odds where their number is concerned, have been making magnificent efforts to build up a library of national film masterpieces, produced and acted by British artists on British soil. And in this movement the Hepworth Manufacturing Company … have been leaders.¹⁵

So began the review of David Copperfield in the other leading British trade paper of the period, The Bioscope. Central to the film’s critical success was what was deemed an authentic reproduction of Dickens’s novel. Even The Dickensian was impressed:

The film not only includes all the most prominent characters and all the necessary incidents of the book to make the story intelligible to the lay reader, but they have been enacted in the actual places in which the novelist laid them. With the narrative so well maintained, the scenery accurate and the acting so life-like and natural, the film should be a popular success wherever it is shown and no Dickens lover should miss the opportunity of seeing it.¹⁶

But, in trying to be so faithful to the narrative and its setting, the film ends up parading a series of relatively discrete attractions in a highly episodic narrative, with much of the work of narration having to be provided by the spectator from outside the bounds of the film text. As Low puts it, whereas East Lynne is much more assured as a piece of continuous storytelling, David Copperfield ‘is perfected piece by piece, its quality in the individual shots rather than in the manner of the combination’.¹⁷

Without some foreknowledge of the story of David Copperfield, it is often difficult to determine who characters are and why they act in the way that they do. The pictorialist images, charming though they are, often seem superfluous to narrative development. But there is no doubt that they are beautifully photographed and make the most of some delightful scenery, especially characterful old buildings, gardens, country lanes and coastal settings. The camera stands...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: approaching British rural landscapes on film
• 1 Silent landscapes: rural settings, national identity and British silent cinema
• 2 British landscapes in pre-Second World War film publicity
• 3 Rural imagery in Second World War British cinema
• 4 ‘An unlimited field for experiment’: Britain’s stereoscopic landscapes
• 5 The figure (and disfigurement) in the landscape: The Go-Between’s picturesque
• 6 ‘Here is Wales, there England’: contested borders and blurred boundaries in On the Black Hill
• 7 Where the land meets the sea: liminality, identity and rural landscape in contemporary Scottish cinema
• 8 Fantasy, fallacy and allusion: reconceptualising British landscapes through the lens of children’s cinema
• 9 Picturesque, pastoral and dirty: uncivilised topographies in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
• 10 Folk horror and the contemporary cult of British rural landscape: the case of Blood on Satan’s Claw
• 11 sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel
• 12 Film and the repossession of rural space: interview with Patrick Keiller
• Index