British Cinema, Past and Present

Justine Ashby, Andrew Higson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135125158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

British Cinema: Past and Present responds to the commercial and critical success of British film in the 1990s. Providing a historical perspective to the contemporary resurgence of British cinema, this unique anthology brings together leading international scholars to investigate the rich diversity of British film production, from the early sound period of the 1930s to the present day.
The contributors address:
* British Cinema Studies and the concept of national cinema
* the distribution and reception of British films in the US and Europe
* key genres, movements and cycles of British cinema in the 1940s, 50s and 60s
* questions of authorship and agency, with case studies of individual studios, stars, producers and directors
* trends in British cinema, from propaganda films of the Second World War to the New Wave and the 'Swinging London' films of the Sixties
* the representation of marginalised communities in films such as Trainspotting and The Full Monty
* the evolution of social realism from Saturday Night, Sunday Morning to Nil By Mouth
* changing approaches to Northern Ireland and the Troubles in films like The Long Good Friday and Alan Clarke's Elephant
* contemporary 'art' and 'quality' cinema, from heritage drama to the work of Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Terence Davies and Patrick Keiller.

Part I

RE-FRAMING BRITISH CINEMA STUDIES

Introduction

The publication of British Cinema, Past and Present acknowledges that British Cinema Studies has come of age, and that it has reached its present maturity by drawing on a diversity of approaches and methodologies. In this first section, two writers instrumental in establishing historical and critical debates about British cinema offer fresh perspectives on some key developments in the field to date. Jeffrey Richards charts the different influences and agendas that have shaped writing about British cinema history and identifies several issues that he thinks deserve fuller investigation in the future. He mounts a persuasive defence of empiricist history, demonstrating how close attention to the specific social and industrial conditions in which a film is produced and received is an indispensable prerequisite of rigorous cultural history. At the same time, he warns against the antagonism that has sometimes surfaced between Cinema History and Film Studies and prescribes a more collaborative climate in which scholars of British cinema, whatever their creed, recognise their shared interests and investments.

Andrew Higson enters into a dialogue about how best to define and implement the boundaries of British cinema. He questions the validity of persevering with the critical concept of British national cinema, suggesting that it is – and perhaps always was – a tenuous idea as much the product of critical reading strategies as of the films themselves. In its place, Higson argues for a more pluralist and flexible term, ‘post-national cinema’, able to take account of the complexities of transnationalism and multiculturalism.

Richards and Higson use their chapters as an opportunity to take stock of the present state of British Cinema Studies. Both offer accessible and reflective overviews of significant trends in British Cinema Studies, reconsidering and revising their own established positions. But while they describe British cinema scholarship with broad brushstrokes, they also attend to detail, applying their arguments to specific historical periods, genres or cycles. Thus Richards rethinks the 1930s from the perspective of a cultural historian. Similarly, Higson revisits some of the so-called consensus films of the 1930s and 1940s, showing how these texts are as susceptible to readings that emphasise themes of diaspora and liminality as the more explicitly ‘post-national’ films of the 1980s and 1990s.

1

RETHINKING BRITISH CINEMA

Jeffrey Richards

As we enter the twenty-first century, the study of the previous century's distinctive art form – the cinema – seems to have come of age. On all sides there are new journals, new book series, new courses, and path-breaking conferences. There is an almost palpable sense of intellectual excitement in the air – and at its heart lies the systematic and creative process of rethinking British cinema.

As we engage in this process, we need to be aware that there are broadly speaking two principal alternative approaches to the study of film in the UK: Film Studies and Cinema History. They grew out of different disciplines, each with its own emphases, methodologies and approaches. Film Studies developed out of English Literature and Cinema History out of History. At the risk of oversimplifying, Film Studies has been centrally concerned with the text, with minute visual and structural analysis of individual films, with the application of a variety of sometimes abstruse theoretical approaches, with the eliciting of meanings that neither the film-makers nor contemporary audiences and critics – so far as we can tell – would have recognised. Cinema History has placed its highest priority on context, on the locating of films securely in the setting of their makers’ attitudes, constraints and preoccupations, on audience reaction and contemporary understandings. Neither camp has an exclusive monopoly of wisdom. Both are needed. Both are valuable. Recently there has been a rewarding convergence between the two approaches, as cinema historians have taken on board some of the more useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments, such as gender theory, and the Film Studies scholars have been grounding their film analysis more securely in historical context. The result has been that many scholars on both sides would now regard themselves more broadly as cultural historians. But there remains an unproductive hostility between some adherents of the alternative approaches. This has taken the form of the cursory dismissal of works which deserve a more serious engagement with their ideas and approaches.¹ Criticism is of course inevitable and desirable, but it is best delivered in a spirit of gentleness and good humour. For we are, when all is said and done, all colleagues in the wider struggle against the enormous condescension of the likes of François Truffaut who famously declared the terms British and cinema to be incompatible.

Empirical cinema history

A regular criticism of Cinema History is that it is devoid of theory. As an empiricist of many years standing, I feel that it is worth pointing out to the proponents of that argument that empiricism is a theory and one that is longer established and more thoroughly tried and tested than some of the more fashionable but short-lived theories of recent years. The wholesale application to film criticism of the French linguistics theories associated with Saussure and the psychoanalytic ideas of Lacan, part of a bid to treat film analysis as a precise science, led for a while to the critical dominance of ‘the sterile notion of the self-sufficient text’, the idea that films possessed a meaning that was independent of the prevailing social, cultural, political and economic contexts.² That approach is now seen as both restrictive and ahistorical. The empirical cinema historian deals for the most part not in mere speculation but in solid archival research, the assembling, evaluation and interpretation of the facts about the production and reception of films. Particular emphasis is placed on establishing and exploring the context, social, cultural, political and economic, within which the film was produced. The empirical cinema historian has three main concerns. The first is to analyse the content of the individual film and ascertain how its themes and ideas are conveyed by script, mise-en-scène, acting, direction, editing, photography and music. The second is to understand how and why the film was made when it was made and how it related to the political, social and industrial situations in which it was produced. The third is to discover how the film was received by reference to box-office returns, newspaper reviews and audience reaction where it can be ascertained.³

It is a truism that films change their meaning with the passage of time, with changes in the nature and circumstances of the audience. A film produced in 1930 necessarily means something very different to an audience in 2000 from what it meant to an audience in 1930. But my primary interest as a cultural historian is to recover from films evidence about the contemporary values and attitudes, about the social and sexual roles of men and women, the concepts of work and leisure, class and race, peace and war at the time when the films were made. For me, therefore, films are one way of entering the mind of the ‘silent majority’. What particular films come to mean to later generations, what they may mean now, is of much less interest to me than what they meant when they first appeared. Because this is the project, my concern is exclusively with cinema in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s when cinema-going was in the words of historian A.J.P. Taylor, ‘the essential social habit of the age’.⁴

This empirical project and its contextual emphasis seem still not to be understood fully in some quarters. My recent book, Films and British National Identity, was castigated by some critics for failing to take much account of British cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.⁵ But this criticism wholly failed to recognise that I was avowedly dealing with the cinema when it was a mass medium aiming to reach a cross-class, all-age audience. Since the 1970s the cinema has been a sectional medium, largely aimed at the under-thirties, and has been supplanted by television as the vehicle for the expression of a national identity. Cinema is therefore of much less value today for the contextual cinema historian as an indicator of the nation's preoccupations in the round than the popular television soaps, police thrillers or docudramas: hence my concentration on cinema pre-1970.

The empirical approach to British cinema history has not a founding father but a founding mother – Rachael Low, whose work has in my view been insufficiently acknowledged by students of film history. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Low virtually invented the history of the British cinema. She was working for the British Film Institute (BFI) Information Department when it was decided that there should be some form of publication to mark the fiftieth anniversary in 1946 of the introduction of cinema into Britain. There existed at that time no systematic or authoritative history of the British cinema. The BFI set up a committee to plan and direct a programme of research into the history of the film industry and Rachael Low was commissioned to research and write what eventually ran to seven volumes covering the history of the British cinema from 1896 to 1939. She identified three sources of information. The surviving films of the period, which she systematically viewed; the reminiscences of pioneer film-makers, renters and exhibitors whom she interviewed; and documentary evidence both published and unpublished: catalogues, press books, contemporary reviews, letters, memoirs and above all the trade press, in particular complete runs of the Bioscope and the Kinematograph Weekly, which she patiently ploughed through, issue by issue, year by year.⁶ The films, the written documents and oral history remain the principal sources of empirical histories, and in the end there is no substitute for immersing yourself in all three, steeping yourself in the images, ideas and words of the period, so that when you come to make sense of particular films and particular directors you can hear their voices in your head and see their world in your mind's eye.

British film culture

Rachael Low's volumes were the product of a particular moment in British film culture – a moment of confidence and belief, largely inspired by the cinema's wartime achievements. The general attitude of the intelligentsia to British cinema during the 1920s and 1930s had been one of despair, lightened by occasional rays of optimism as individual films met with the approval of the intellectuals who ran such key institutions as Close Up magazine and The Film Society. Paul Rotha summed up the attitude in his massive and magisterial The Film Till Now, first published in 1930, reprinted in 1949 and long regarded as authoritative. He wrote of British cinema:

The British film has never been self-sufficient, in that it has never achieved its independence … It has no other aim than that of the imitation of the cinema of other countries. … British studios are filled with persons of third rate intelligence who are inclined to condemn anything that is beyond their range.⁷

British intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s tended to favour Continental European cinema, experimental and avant-garde film-making and the British documentary movement.

By contrast with the despair of the interwar period, the late 1940s positively glowed with an optimism inspired by the belief that film had been accepted as an art form and British cinema was now valued as a serious and respect-worthy national cinema. This optimism took the form of the foundation of the British Film Academy in 1946, the launching of the Penguin Film Review in 1946, the revitalisation of the British Film Institute and a plethora of book publishing on British cinema issues. The dominant critical ethic of the late 1940s and the viewpoint from which British cinema was judged was the one identified by John Ellis in his seminal article on late 1940s film criticism. After a careful, thorough analysis of a broad range of newspaper and journal reviews, he established this critical stance as one which placed greatest value on documentary realism, literary quality and a middle-class improvement ethic.⁸ But the moment of self-confidence was brief and the optimism waned in the early 1950s.

As it did so, other critical voices began to be heard. The magazine Sequence (1946–1952) began to pay serious critical attention to Hollywood cinema. Lindsay Anderson, one of its editors, wrote later that:

By the end of the War, British films were respectable and over-praised. They had made their contribution to the mood of national self-confidence. They reflected the class divisions of the country faithfully enough … the industry remained a closed shop … Why should we join in the chorus of praise? It was much more useful surely, to draw attention to the vision and vitality of American cinema – then much despised.⁹

It was an attitude picked up and developed by the next important development in the cinema culture, the magazine Movie, founded in 1962. Movie saw itself as a response to the failure of British film criticism, which it defined as having been epitomised by the BFI's magazine Sight and Sound, still wedded to reverence for declining European art cinema and characterised by ‘a set of liberal and aesthetic platitudes which st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Re-Framing British Cinema Studies
• Part II The Distribution and Reception of British Films Abroad
• Part III Cinema, Popular Culture and the Middlebrow
• Part IV Authorship and Agency
• Part V Genres, Movements and Cycles
• Part VI Contemporary Cinema 1 Britain's other communities
• Part VII Contemporary Cinema 2 Whose heritage?
• Select Bibliography British cinema 1930–2000
• Index