A companion to British and Irish cinema 9781118477519, 1118477510, 9781118482902, 9781118482834

Table of contents :
Content: British silent cinema / Jon Burrows --
Cinema in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1930s / Kevin Rockett --
British cinema in the 1930s / Lawrence Napper --
British cinema and the Second World War / James Chapman --
The 1950s and 1960s / Melanie Williams --
Irish cinema's first wave: histories and legacies of the 1970s and 1980s / Maeve Connolly --
History, heritage and the national past in British cinema of the 1980s and 1990s / Geoff Eley --
Filing with words: British cinema, literature and adaptation / Christine Geraghty --
British film genres / Peter Hutchings --
British cinema and authorship / Sheldon Hall --
Acting and stardom / Jim Leach --
British and Irish film music / Kevin Donnelly --
Irish cinema and international screen culture / Martin McLoone --
Vernacular visions: Ireland and accented cinema / Luke Gibbons --
British film industry and policy: issues and debates / Duncan Petrie --
British cinema and technology / Sarah Street --
Irish film: industry and policy / Roddy Flynn --
British cinema and television / Dave Rolinson --
Gender, sexuality and British cinema / Niall Richardson --
Space, place and architecture in British films: the case of Last resort (2000) / Paul Newland --
Gender, sexuality and Irish film / Debbie Ging --
Space and place in Irish cinema / Conn Holohan --
The proletariat and British cinema / Paul Dave --
Race and ethnicity in British cinema / Sarita Malik --
The Englishness of British cinema: beyond the valley of the corn dollies / Julian Petley --
Trainspotter's delight: issues and themes in Scottish film criticism / Jonathan Murray --
The cinema has two tongues: the cinema cultures of Wales / Daryl Perrins --
Screening Irish-America / Ruth Barton --
Transnational strategies in British cinema: the example of Slumdog millionaire / Jim English.

Citation preview

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema

Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America, the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers. Published: A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Aniko Imre A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaelle Moine, and Hilary Radner A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C. M. Yau A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic ́ A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano A Companion to Australian Cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, edited by John Hill Forthcoming: A Companion to Indian Cinema, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser

A Companion to

British and Irish Cinema Edited by

John Hill

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of John Hill to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Name: Hill, John (W. John), editor. Title: A companion to British and Irish cinema / edited by John Hill. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, [2019] | Series: Wiley Blackwell   companions to national cinemas | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018055494 (print) | LCCN 2018059870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118482902   (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118482834 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118477519 (hardcover) | Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Great Britain. | Motion pictures–Ireland. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.G7 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.G7 C66 2019 (print) | DDC 791.430941–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055494 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © Eakachai Leesin/EyeEm/Getty Images Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

About the Editor Notes on Contributors

viii ix

Introduction John Hill

1

Part I  Histories: Issues and Debates

5

1 British Silent Cinema Jon Burrows

7

2 Cinema in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1930s Kevin Rockett

29

3 British Cinema in the 1930s Lawrence Napper

49

4 British Cinema and the Second World War James Chapman

67

5 The 1950s and 1960s Melanie Williams

84

6 Irish Cinema’s First Wave: Histories and Legacies of the 1970s and the 1980s Maeve Connolly

106

7 History, Heritage and the National Past in British Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s 127 Geoff Eley Part II  Critical Approaches: Debating Film Texts

141

8 Filming with Words: British Cinema, Literature and Adaptation Christine Geraghty

143

9 British Film Genres Peter Hutchings

158

vi Contents 10 British Cinema and Authorship Sheldon Hall

177

11 Acting and Stardom Jim Leach

201

12 British and Irish Film Music K. J. Donnelly

217

13 Irish Cinema and International Screen Culture Martin McLoone

234

14 Vernacular Visions: Ireland and Accented Cinema Luke Gibbons

260

Part III  Critical Approaches: Debating Film Contexts

275

15 British Film Industry and Policy: Issues and Debates Duncan Petrie

277

16 British Cinema and Technology Sarah Street

298

17 Irish Film: Industry and Policy Roderick Flynn

313

18 British Cinema and Television David Rolinson

332

Part IV  Representation and Identity

347

19 Gender, Sexuality, and British Cinema Niall Richardson

349

20 Space, Place, and Architecture in British Films: The Case of Last Resort (2000) Paul Newland

372

21 Gender, Sexuality, and Irish Film Debbie Ging

386

22 Space and Place in Irish Cinema Conn Holohan

407

23 The Proletariat and British Cinema Paul Dave

423

24 Race and Ethnicity in British Cinema Sarita Malik

443

Contents vii Part V  Redefining ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ Cinemas

461

25 The Englishness of British Cinema: Beyond the Valley of the Corn Dollies Julian Petley

463

26 Trainspotter’s Delight: Issues and Themes in Scottish Film Criticism Jonathan Murray

490

27 The Cinema Has Two Tongues: The Cinema Cultures of Wales Daryl Perrins

510

28 Screening Irish‐America Ruth Barton

532

29 Transnational Strategies in British Cinema: The Example of Slumdog Millionaire James F. English

545

Index565

About the Editor

John Hill is Professor of Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. He  has  written widely on both British and Irish cinema and his publications include Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (1986), Cinema and Ireland (co‐author, 1987), British Cinema in the 1980s (1999), Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (2006), Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (2011) and Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy (co‐ed., 2018).

Notes on Contributors

Ruth Barton is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has written widely on Irish cinema and on stardom and her publications include Irish National Cinema (2004). Screening Irish‐America (ed., 2009), Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell (2004), Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (2014) and Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2019). Jon Burrows is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908–1918 (2003) and The British Cinema Boom, 1909–1914: A Commercial History (2017). James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His work on British cinema includes The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (1998), Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (1999), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (2005), and A New History of British Documentary (2015). Maeve Connolly co‐directs the Masters in Art and Research Collaboration at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. Her publications include The Glass Eye: Artists and Television (co‐ed., 2000), The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (2009), and TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (2014). Paul Dave is a Reader at Teesside University. He has published a range of essays on British cinema and culture and is the author of Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (2006). K. J. Donnelly is Professor of Film and Film Music at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (2015), Occult Aesthetics: Sound and Image Synchronization (2013), The Spectre of Sound (2005), and Pop Music in British Cinema (2001).

x

Notes on Contributors

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan. His many books include Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005), and Nazism as Fascism (2013). James F. English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth‐Century Britain (1994), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), and The Global Future of English Studies (2012). Roderick Flynn is Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. He has written widely on Irish screen policy and is co‐author of the Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema (2007) and Irish Media: A Critical History (2nd edition, 2017). Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her books include Women and Soap Opera (1991), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (2000), Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2008), and Bleak House (2012). Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland, and at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His recent publications include Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (2015), and Limits of the  Visible: Representing the Irish Great Famine (2015), and among his other p­ublications are Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), and Cinema and Ireland (co‐author, 1987). Debbie Ging is Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University and is the author of Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (2012). Sheldon Hall is Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, He is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It (2005), co‐author of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010) and co-editor of Widescreen Worldwide (2010). Conn Holohan is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the author of Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film (2010) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on space and place in European and Hollywood cinema. Peter Hutchings was Professor of Film Studies at Northumbria University, Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, and the author of a number of books including Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (1993), Terence Fisher (2001), The Horror Film (2004), and the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema (2nd edition, 2017).



Notes on Contributors

xi

Jim Leach is Professor Emeritus at Brock University. His publications include Claude Jutra (2000), British Film (2004) Film in Canada (2006), and Dr. Who (2009). Sarita Malik is Professor in Media and Communications at Brunel University London. She has written widely on issues of race and diversity and is the author of Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television (2002) and co‐editor of Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race (2017). Martin McLoone is Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at Ulster University. He is the author of Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (2000) and Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland (2007) and co‐author of Rock and Popular Music in Ireland (2012). Jonathan Murray is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. He is the co‐editor of Scottish Cinema Now (2009) and the author of Discomfort and Joy: The Cinema of Bill Forsyth (2011), and The New Scottish Cinema (2015). Lawrence Napper is Senior Lecturer in Film at King’s College, University of London. He is the author of British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (2009) and The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s (2015). Paul Newland is REF Manager at Bath Spa University and was previously Reader in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University. He is author of The Cultural Construction of London’s East End (2008) and British Films of the 1970s (2013) as well as editor of Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (2010) and British Rural Landscapes on Film (2016). Daryl Perrins is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of South Wales and is the author of several articles on Welsh film and television. Julian Petley is Professor of Journalism at the University of Brunel. His many publications include Capital and Culture: German Cinema, 1933–1945 (1979), Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate (co‐ed., 2001), Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (co‐author, 2005), and Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (2011). He is also Principal Editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Duncan Petrie is Professor of Film and Television at the University of York. He has published on various aspects of Scottish, British and New Zealand cinema and is the author of The British Cinematographer (1996), Screening Scotland (2000), Contemporary Scottish Fictions (2004), and co‐author of Educating Film‐Makers (2014). Niall Richardson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman (2008), Transgressive Bodies:

xii

Notes on Contributors

Representations in Film and Popular Culture (2016), Ageing Femininity on Screen (2018) and co‐author of Gender and the Media (2014) and Studying Sexualities (2013). Kevin Rockett was a Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he is now a Fellow Emeritus. His many publications include Cinema and Ireland (1987, co‐author), The Irish Filmography (1996), Irish Film Censorship (2004) and, with Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (2011), and Film Exhibition and Distribution in Ireland, 1909–2010 (2011). David Rolinson is a Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Stirling. He  is the author of Alan Clarke (2005) and co‐editor of a collection of Dennis Potter’s writing, The Art of Invective (2015). Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol. Her many publications include British National Cinema (1997), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002), Colour Films in Britain (2012), and Deborah Kerr (2018). Melanie Williams is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She is the author Prisoners of Gender: Women in the Films of J. Lee Thompson (2009), David Lean (2014), and Female Stars of British Cinema (2017).

Introduction John Hill

At the end of the 1960s, film critic Alan Lovell could still describe British cinema as the ‘unknown cinema’ (1972). If this was so of British cinema, it was an even more accurate description of Irish cinema which, prior to the 1970s, was virtually terra incognita. Since then, however, the intellectual landscape has changed ­considerably. As Lovell himself was later to observe: In the space of twenty‐five years we have moved from scarcity to abundance. There are now solid histories of the British cinema; detailed explorations of British genre film‐making; analyses of important historical ‘moments’; critical examinations of important film‐makers; wide‐ranging anthologies; informed discussions of the economic and cultural context of current British film‐making; informative accounts of Welsh and Scottish film‐making. (2001)

This could also be said of the study of Irish cinema which has undergone a similar upsurge in critical and historical writing, so that there are now not only several general accounts of the cinema and Ireland but also a number of specific studies devoted to the cinema and Northern Ireland, film censorship, individual films,  directors, actors and genres, as well as aspects of film narration and representation.1 However, as more has become known about British and Irish cinemas, this also means that British and Irish Cinema Studies have extended beyond straightforward ‘knowledge‐gathering’ activities and become the sites of substantial intellectual arguments and critical debates concerning the ways in which these cinemas are to be analysed and understood. Such arguments have, in turn, become interwoven with debates concerning the theorisation and study of ‘national cinemas’ more generally. It is these arguments and debates that the Companion to British and Irish Cinema sets out to address. As such, it is probabIy better understood as a companion

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

2

John Hill

to British and Irish cinema studies than to the history of these cinemas per se.2 Accordingly, its primary purpose is to consider how the analysis and discussion of British and Irish cinema have been conducted, the main concepts that have been employed and the forms of explanation and interpretation of British and Irish films that have ensued. In some respects, these issues correspond to more general arguments within film and cinema studies regarding the conduct of film historiography, the methods of textual analysis, the linking of films to social, economic, and political contexts and the employment of critical judgements in relation to individual films and directors. However, such concerns may also assume a specific dimension in ­relation to the study of the cinemas of Britain and Ireland. Jeffrey Richards, for example, has suggested that the study of British cinema has involved a division between ‘Cinema History’, growing out of traditional historical approaches and placing an emphasis upon social and economic contexts, and ‘Film Studies’, growing out of literary studies and focusing primarily on the workings of film texts (2000, p. 21). This might be said to possess a parallel within Irish film studies which is sometimes characterised as evidencing a split between empirically‐based historical ‘­revisionism’ and more conceptual forms of ‘post‐colonial’ theorising. In both cases, such d­ ivisions may be linked to differences in the weighting given to the theoretical and the empirical, the aesthetic and the social, and the analytic and the evaluative. These dichotomies are, however, less clear‐cut than they are generally portrayed to be and most work on both British and Irish cinemas has involved a mix of frameworks and approaches. The most interesting questions, therefore, tend to relate to the ways in which different studies identify and articulate the ­relationships between the theoretical and the empirical, the textual and the contextual, and the artistic and social, and, in doing so, bring together the analysis and interpretation of film texts with social and economic explanations of their ­production, reception, and meaning. Such debates are evident in Part I of the volume, ‘Histories: Issues and Debates’, which looks at the arguments surrounding different periods of British and Irish cinema and the ways in which these have been discussed and understood. The chapters in Part I raise general questions regarding periodisation and the basis upon which film history is conducted alongside more specific reflections upon the issues that most commonly arise in thinking about a particular period and the films that have been selected as most worthy of examination. This involves discussion of how film‐making has been shaped by social and economic conditions as well as consideration of the types of films produced and their valuation by both critics and historians. In the case of British cinema, this has often involved arguments about the relative socio‐cultural importance and critical merits of ­different aesthetic traditions related to ‘realism’, literary adaptation, and more popular forms of genre, ‘melodrama’ and ‘fantasy’ while, in the case, of Irish cinema – which has not, of course, enjoyed the same levels of production as its

Introduction

3

British counterpart – the discussion of the role of art cinema, and more experimental work, has assumed a prominence alongside the analysis of more popular works (that may have been produced by companies based outside the country). Some of the arguments to be found in the selected historical overviews re‐ emerge in Part II, ‘Critical Approaches: Debating Film Texts’, which focuses more specifically on approaches to the films themselves, paying particular attention to questions of authorship and genre, literary adaptation, and traditions of acting and musical composition. Although literary adaptation has often been assumed to be a hallmark of British cinema (albeit often negatively), the status, and significance, of authorship, mise‐en‐scène, genre, and stardom within British film‐­ making have often been subject to question, particularly in comparison to Hollywood cinema, and the issues to which such questioning has given rise are explored in the relevant chapters. The relations between authorship and genre in the different industrial and national‐political context of Irish cinema are also discussed. The emphasis of the chapters in Part II is complemented by Part III, ‘Critical Approaches: Debating Film Contexts’, which lays stress on the contexts in which films are made, distributed, and exhibited. This involves a focus on the industrial and policy arrangements in which film‐making occurs, the relationship of film to television, and the significance of technological change more generally. Although these chapters do not discuss individual films in detail, they collectively address a number of  the ways in which the film‐making of both Britain and Ireland has been shaped by, and bears the imprint of, the circumstances in which it has materialised. This leads into Part IV, ‘Representation and Identity’, focusing on how the cinemas of Britain and Ireland have articulated a sense of place and addressed issues of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. Such issues have become of prime importance for recent film scholarship and the chapters in Part IV not only indicate how films draw upon their surrounding cultures but actively intervene in them through the ways in which films of varying forms and styles articulate different forms of identity and belonging. While these chapters reveal some of the ways in which such forms of identity are constructed in relation to nationally specific circumstances, they also put into question versions of ‘national identity’ that are based on ideas of homogeneity and unity. It is therefore appropriate that the final Part should address directly the very idea of the ‘nationality’ of cinema. Although this volume brings British and Irish cinema together (and takes stock of some of the ways they interconnect), it is, of course, acutely conscious of how each is shaped by very different political, economic, and cultural dynamics, and construct very different national ­imaginaries. In Part V, ‘Redefining “British” and “Irish” Cinemas’, however, the conceptualisations of ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ cinema are themselves subject to debate and redefinition. In the case of British cinema, there is an emphasis upon how it  has come to be understood as a series of cinemas that are themselves

4

John Hill

heterogeneous rather than homogeneous: ‘English’ cinema, ‘Scottish’ cinema and ‘Welsh’ cinema. In the case of both British and Irish cinema, there is also a recognition of how both are involved in various kinds of ‘transnational’ dynamics that complicate any simple – ‘essentialist’ – model of ‘national cinema’. Thus, while it is the ‘nationalities’ of British and Irish cinema that, in a sense, provide the volume with its coherence, the idea of what constitutes the ‘Britishness’ (‘Englishness’/ ‘Scottishness’/‘Welshness’) and ‘Irishness’ of these cinemas is itself subject to question (as is the conventional concept of ‘national cinema’ more generally). In ways such as this, the Companion aims to provide an overview of British and Irish cinema studies that does justice to the range of approaches employed and issues discussed. It is not, however, comprehensive and some gaps will be evident. However, in drawing together a broad range of authors, dealing with a variety of issues, it is hoped that the volume will add to the numerous debates surrounding the analysis and discussion of British and Irish cinemas and raise questions about their future study.

Notes 1 For my own accounts of the trajectories of Irish and British Film Studies, see, ­respectively, Hill (2007) and Hill (2010). 2 For informative summaries of the histories of British and Irish cinema, see, r­ espectively, Burton and Chibnall (2013) and Flynn and Brereton (2007). The existence of historical dictionaries such as these does, of course, testify to the huge growth in knowledge of the two cinemas.

References Burton, Alan and Chibnall, Steve (eds.) (2013). Historical Dictionary of British Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Flynn, Roderick and Brereton, Patrick (eds.) (2007). Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Hill, John (2007). Irish Film Studies: twenty years on. In: Irish Films, Global Cinema: Studies in Irish Film, vol. 4 (ed. Martin McLoone and Kevin Rockett), 15–26. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Hill, John (2010). Revisiting British Film Studies. Journal of British Cinema and Television 7 (2): 299–310. Lovell, Alan (1972). The unknown cinema of Britain. Cinema Journal 11 (2): 1–8. Lovell, Alan (2001). The British cinema: the known cinema? In: The British Cinema Book, 2e (ed. Robert Murphy), 200–205. London: British Film Institute. Richards, Jeffrey (2000). Rethinking British cinema. In: British Cinema: Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson), 21–24. London: Routledge.

Part I

Histories Issues and Debates

1

British Silent Cinema Jon Burrows

Introduction Trying to establish even a very basic summary of key facts and events in the history of silent cinema in Britain, one is confronted with historiographical controversies and ambiguities at every turn. It was at one time an orthodox stance to claim that the first truly viable moving image camera and projector was invented in Britain by William Friese Greene (e.g. Allister 1948); a monument erected at his grave in Highgate Cemetery calls him ‘The Inventor of Kinematography’, and The Magic Box, an expensive feature‐length Technicolor biopic celebrating Friese‐Greene’s ‘achievements’, was produced for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (Figure  1.1). Following a comprehensive critique of the merits and practical feasibility of Friese Greene’s patents (Coe 1969a, b, c) this presumption has now come to seem ridiculous, but chronicling the introduction of cinematography in Britain is still not straightforward. It has become canonical practice to date the birth of cinema in Britain to 20 or 21 February 1896, which were the dates of the first public performances of the Lumière Cinématographe at the Polytechnic in London’s Upper Regent Street for – respectively – an invited group of journalists and then the first paying audience. The compilers of reference works do not appear to have noticed an essay published in 1996 to coincide with the official centenary of cinema in  Britain, which convincingly argued that a successful demonstration by Birt Acres of his own projector to the Lyonsdown Photographic Club on 10 January 1896 should be recognised as Britain’s first public film screening (Brown 1996). There is no small matter of controversy involved in choosing to celebrate the first instances of film projection as the birth of the cinema. Before the publication of Gordon Hendricks’s ground‐breaking work on Thomas Edison (1961), most A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Jon Burrows

Figure 1.1  Robert Donat as William Friese‐Greene in The Magic Box (1951).

film historians seem to have been unaware that the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing cabinet developed by the Edison Company in New Jersey were photographic moving image technologies which used 35 mm celluloid film. One might consequently argue that the history of cinematography in Britain was effectively launched when two Americans, Franck Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus, opened a Kinetoscope parlour in London’s Oxford Street to the public on 17 October 1894. The Kinetoscope was illicitly replicated by Robert W. Paul later the same year, and by March 1895 Paul and/or Birt Acres (both claimed sole credit) had managed to reverse engineer a moving image camera similar to Edison’s Kinetograph and shoot the first British 35 mm films. Until 1908, moving image entertainment in Britain was effectively an adjunct to the music hall and fairground industries. Long film shows were strictly the domain of travelling showmen and dedicated fixed‐site ‘cinemas’ were very few and far between outside of London. This essentially replicates the pattern of development experienced throughout the western world, though it is an under‐explained ­peculiarity that the emergence of significant numbers of cinemas in Britain occurred three years later than was the case in America, France, and Germany. A cinema investment boom did not gain momentum in the UK until late 1909. The synchronicity here with the passing into law of a piece of national legislation (the  1909 Cinematograph Act) enforcing safety regulations at film screenings



British Silent Cinema

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appears to be more than coincidental; the establishment of a standardised licensing system seems to have directly stimulated confidence in the sector (Burrows 2004a, pp. 69–71, 82–84). An intensive phase of cinema building ensued in the short period leading up to the First World War, although the precise scale of growth has never been reliably established. Estimates of the number of cinemas operating in Britain by the end of 1914 have ranged from 3500 (Low 1949, p. 23) to 5000 (Hiley 2002, p. 121). The cinema was thus established as a medium of mass entertainment in Britain by the early 1910s, but it is a striking fact that in the present day there is very little knowledge of, or familiarity with, silent British films, directors, and stars among the general public and even many cinephiles. A 1995 documentary  –  Typically British: A Personal History of British Cinema by Stephen Frears – commissioned from one of the country’s leading contemporary directors by the British Film Institute, to celebrate the centenary of cinema, straightforwardly concluded that ‘To all intents and purposes there’d been no silent film industry in Britain’. Scholarship dedicated to rectifying this collective lacuna is not, however, a recent phenomenon, and any reflection on the study of British silent cinema must engage in some way with an ‘official’ four‐volume history of the subject written by Rachael Low, which was originally commissioned in the late 1940s by the newly established British Film Academy (known today as the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, BAFTA) and subsequently supported by the British Film Institute over the following four decades (see Nowell‐Smith 2012, pp. 26–27). There will be numerous observations made in various parts of this commentary concerning the strengths and limitations of this undertaking – still the standard reference work on the topic, and twice republished. But it should first of all be noted that the basic organisation of the text which follows is itself a direct legacy of Low’s project. Low identified distinct chronological phases of development of the British film industry that she felt merited study in separate volumes: 1896–1906; 1906–1914; 1914–1918; 1918–1929. This periodisation was very astute, and continues to be widely regarded as useful and important. The equivalent multi‐volume history of American cinema, published from 1990 onwards, elected to carve up the silent era in much the same way (albeit without a separate study covering the First World War). Moreover, Low’s divisions essentially correspond to the timeframes subsequently associated with some of the most influential critical concepts used to categorise different stages of early film history, e.g. the ‘cinema of attractions’, ‘transitional cinema’, ‘classical cinema’. This chapter will consider the critical study of silent British cinema in three sections, first covering work which predominantly addresses the 1894–1906 ­ period, then the 1907–1918 period, and, finally, 1918–1929. It is by no means the case that these boundaries are always studiously respected and maintained. A lot of scholarship in the field has been published as part of anthologies (typically consisting in the main of conference proceedings) which address specific themed issues across the entire range of British silent film history (e.g. Burton and Porter 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003; Higson 2002; Brown and Davison 2013). Some articles and

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monographs not only cover more than one of these periods but also claim ­important continuities between them (e.g. Kember 2009). Nonetheless, the silent era witnessed a series of particularly dramatic evolutionary changes at the level of  film form and also fundamental structural transformations of its industrial ­organisation, and there are consequently distinct issues and methodologies that have predominated in respective debates about these three sub‐periods.

1894–1906 There is a strong case for arguing that British cinema has never been as ­internationally prominent, successful, and influential as it was between 1900 and 1906. Surviving British films from this period frequently stand out  –  in formal terms – as highly innovative and sophisticated in comparison with their French and American peers. One particularly systematic and meticulous analyst of the global development of filmmaking styles has noted that ‘at the beginning of the ­[twentieth] century the work of British filmmakers was important in a way that was not to be the case again for thirty years’ (Salt 1978, p. 149). This claim has been ­frequently echoed: ‘Seldom if ever again would British film‐makers make so ­substantial a creative contribution to world cinema,’ writes Richard Maltby (1997, p. xi). Recognition by contemporaries of the quality of early British film p­ roduction is evidenced by the extent to which it was often directly imitated. The Brighton‐ based filmmaker G.A. Smith, for example, has been credited with having ‘played an essential role in the early evolution of the edited film in Europe and America’ (Gray 2004, p. 51). Even The Great Train Robbery (1903), that most iconic of American films of the early 1900s, is acknowledged by one of the leading h ­ istorians of early American cinema to have been heavily influenced by A Daring Daylight Burglary, produced earlier in the same year by the Mottershaw company of Sheffield (Musser 1991, p. 256). The legendary French film historian Georges Sadoul declared in the 1940s that, in the ‘brief but brilliant flash’ of British ­f ilmmaking pre‐eminence in the early 1900s, one could find the origins of m ­ ontage ­technique, close framing, and the chase sequence (1946, p. 251). This being the case, it may appear surprising that the body of work specifically dedicated to the study of this pre‐1906 ‘Golden Age’ of British cinema is not ­particularly extensive: within the last 15 years only five new monographs focused squarely on this territory have been published, and none of these deal with the canonical figures of early British fiction filmmaking, such as Robert W. Paul, Cecil Hepworth, William Haggar, Frank Mottershaw, James Bamforth, or the members of what Sadoul famously – if perhaps misleadingly – called the ‘Brighton School’ (Figure 1.2). We might explain this apparent neglect with reference to changing methodological and conceptual paradigms which have held sway in the field of early cinema studies. For one thing, the poor and essentially random survival rate



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Figure 1.2  Early British filmmaking: R. W. Paul’s Artistic Creation (1901).

of films made in the first 10 years of photographic moving image technology can make it very difficult to reliably establish patterns of influence among filmmakers. As historians became more aware in the latter part of the twentieth century of just how much is irrevocably lost, so the game of trying to identify first instances in the lexicon of early film technique – once a key form of validation for early British filmmakers – fell out of fashion somewhat. There has also been heightened awareness in recent decades of the profoundly transnational character of early film culture. Writing in the 1970s, Noël Burch identified (and endorsed) a very different consensus view which had hitherto ­prevailed: ‘All the historians who have discussed the cinema of the 1896–1914 period concur in recognising a very pronounced national specificity in the production of each of the three Western countries [Britain, France and the USA] which between them more or less shared out the world market’ (1990, p. 43). It is now widely acknowledged that the 1978 annual conference of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), held in Brighton, which brought together film archivists and scholars to collectively survey as many surviving fiction films made between 1900 and 1906 as possible, acted as the catalyst for a revitalisation of early cinema studies and the emergence of a new ‘revisionist’ history of silent cinema. This revisionism was largely driven by a change in methodological emphasis – most notably a more systematic approach to both film analysis and the discovery and

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scrutiny of pertinent empirical sources. Another crucial aspect of this ­methodological shift stemmed from the congress organisers’ policy of screening ­contemporaneous films from around the world alongside each other. Abiding ­concepts of national cinema had traditionally remained wedded to the model first established in Paul Rotha’s (1930) book The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema, which mapped out a history of the cinema dominated by distinct artistic trends pioneered in d­ifferent national contexts. The Brighton screenings, however, revealed profound affinities between early filmmakers working across Europe and the US – typical of a time when films circulated very freely across national borders, and ideas and innovations were quickly shared. The first published work of post‐ Brighton scholarship declared that as important as British filmmakers of the pre‐1906 period were, ‘it would be futile to try to consider their work in isolation, since film production was already truly international, with complex ­interconnections between films made in the only significant producing countries’ (Salt 1978, p. 149). These interconnections are prominently demonstrated in the structure and content of several more recent monographs on early British cinema. For example, Martin Sopocy’s and Luke McKernan’s studies of the films and careers of James Williamson (1998) and Charles Urban (2013), respectively, must perforce explain their subjects with very extensive reference to parallel ­developments in, and direct connections with, the American film industry. Another post‐Brighton development which has surely served in some way to discourage a dedicated British focus in scholarship on the pre‐1906 era is the continued influence of Tom Gunning’s theory of the ‘cinema of attractions’. Gunning argues that pre‐1906 cinema shares relatively few of the preoccupations of succeeding generations of filmmakers and is predominantly uninterested in constructing any kind of coherent narrative experience. Instead, it is geared towards delivering unadulterated bursts of diverting visual pleasure, often with the aim of surprising the spectator with spectacular trick effects or the shock of unfamiliar views (Gunning 1990, pp. 56–60). The reputation of British filmmakers of this period had previously been premised upon their role in establishing the basic grammar of narrative cinema, so their importance will inevitably appear less apparent within the parameters of this paradigm. Moreover, where earlier ­generations of film historians mapped out strict dividing lines between different schools of filmmaking practice in the 1890 and the 1900s (e.g. the fantasy fictions of Georges Méliès were typically contrasted with the observational realism of the Lumière brothers), Gunning emphasises overriding similarities between all camps in their shared commitment to providing non‐narrative sensations (1990, p. 57). He has increasingly defined the cinema of attractions in relation to a broader social experience of modernity – chiefly characterised by transformed modes of visual perception – which he identifies as having been acutely felt in all the major industrialised nations at the same time and in essentially similar ways (2005, p. 441). The implications of this compelling and widely adopted conceptual framework are still being absorbed, and it is not difficult to see how it might (unintentionally) serve to discourage explorations conducted along national territorial lines.



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This is not to suggest that the dedicated scholarship on pre‐1906 British cinema which does exist is insubstantial or outdated, though it must first be acknowledged that this is the one period in British silent film history for which the official ‘History of the British Film’ project delivered something less than a vital resource. Volume 1, covering 1896–1906, was jointly written by Rachael Low and Roger Manvell, then the Librarian and Secretary General, respectively, of the British Film Academy, and published in 1948. In marked contrast to the rest of the series, which Low worked on alone, it is a short and sketchy volume, consisting of brief portraits of 17 individuals/companies active in the period (with others – wrongly – said to have ‘left little trace’) and a basic typography of common genres based on catalogue synopses. Later volumes in the series relied primarily on specialist film industry trade papers as their main source of information, and the absence of weekly ­journals before 1907 may help to explain this ‘false start’. The outstanding r­ eference work for this period is instead John Barnes’s five‐volume study of ‘The Beginnings of the Cinema in England,’ from 1894 to 1900, published at intervals between 1976 and 1997 (Barnes 1976, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1997). Barnes, along with his twin brother William, had been a collector of early cinema equipment and ephemera since the 1930s. Their collaborative research, conducted over many decades, more than matched the rigorous standards advocated in the wake of the Brighton FIAF ­congress, and they brought into clear relief a film industry that existed on a much greater scale than their predecessors had realised, and also demonstrated the rich value and importance of a wide range of hitherto neglected sources, such as local newspapers, and specialist photographic and fairground trade papers. While the value of this work – not least as a filmographic resource – remains undimmed, it must be understood as the product of a particular long‐standing paradigm of film historical research. Much like the first substantial histories of American cinema (e.g. Ramsaye 1926), the Barnes books are preoccupied with patent records and establishing an order of primacy in the sphere of technological innovation. They present a linear narrative of development in which technology is presented as the main driver of change, and while Barnes was never fooled like many of his ­predecessors into chauvinistically promoting the serial patentee Friese‐Greene as the true inventor of cinema, his books do seek to nominate an alternative hero figure who deserves recognition as the dominant figure in the creation of the British film industry. In this account, Robert W. Paul takes the prize by virtue of his perceived superiority in the technical domain: Paul himself later admitted that the results obtained with the Lumière machine were ‘superior in steadiness and clearness’ to his own. But in its defence it must now be admitted that Paul’s machine was much superior in principle and provided the ­prototype for the modern film projector. (1976, pp. 47–48)

More recent work has sought to demonstrate how the emergence of the film industry in Britain was shaped by broader cultural and economic forces. Michael Chanan, for example, situates the development of celluloid film in the context of

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Britain’s overseas investments in the sodium nitrate fields of Chile, and argues that many key commercial, aesthetic, and ideological film industry practices may be attributed to the influence of the ‘dominant form of popular urban entertainment in Britain’: the music hall (1996, pp. 98–100, 132–134). Richard Brown and Barry Anthony (1999) have produced an extraordinary case study of a single early film company, the British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate Ltd.  –  the European ­f ulcrum of a vast multinational conglomerate – which places its history in a wider economic context and examines how its considerable ambitions can be more ­fruitfully explained and understood with reference to orthodox, late nineteenth‐ century managerial practices and the protocols of appealing to capital markets. An  underlying aim of their book is to demonstrate the rapid maturity and ­sophistication of the early film industry, in contradistinction to the nomenclature adopted by film theorists like Noël Burch, who classes cinema of the 1890 and 1900s as a ‘Primitive Mode of Representation’, as opposed to the ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’ which is seen to dominate thereafter (1990, pp. 186–199). This opposition is also firmly challenged in Joe Kember’s (2009) analysis of early British film culture, which argues that the first filmic systems of representation and ­spectatorship were organised in accordance with deep‐rooted ‘institutional’ structures previously established in performance traditions associated with ­ ­illustrated ­lectures and fairground showmanship. Kember is quick to stress that the cultural frameworks he identifies share clear ‘equivalences with the institutional configurations existing in the USA, France, and other countries’ (2009, p. 7). This returns us to the question of whether a ­nationally specific study of early British cinema can identify important nationally specific trends. Sadoul’s perception of a distinctive ‘Brighton School’ does still retain some influence. It received its most substantial elaboration in Martin Sopocy’s research on the film production career of James Williamson, which argues that the magic lantern background of many important British pioneers grounded them in a ­photographic conception of the medium which differed from the prevailing ‘aphotographic bias that equated the projected picture with a theatrical stage’ in other countries (1998, p. 27). Sopocy’s contention that Williamson’s filmmaking philosophy was so distinct from his continental rivals that in some films he actively parodies their representation of space (1998, p. 47) is highly speculative and debatable, but he presents persuasive evidence that Williamson was conscious of significant differences between British and American exhibition practices, and ­ tailored the prints he exported across the Atlantic ­accordingly (1998, pp. 87–131). Burch (1990) has argued that it is not so much the lantern experience of early British filmmakers as their ‘class origins’ which ‘lay behind the astonishing ­inventions in which their work abounds’. He suggests that being ‘steeped in ­middle‐class culture’, they had conservative ideological motivations to try and shape the thoughts and behaviour of the working‐class audiences they exclusively catered for (1990, pp. 96–97). This formulation is undoubtedly far too crude, and



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the broader class composition of film audiences in the 1900s has been repeatedly demonstrated in recent years (see, for example, Brown 2004; Burrows 2010). However, the study of early British cinema in relation to issues of class and ­ideology has enjoyed a revival of late. Maurizio Cinquegrani (2014) has analysed the representation of urban space in early British non‐fiction films as the product of an imperialist mindset. Vanessa Toulmin’s (2006) study of the recently discovered collection of over 800 non‐fiction titles produced by the Blackburn firm of Mitchell and Kenyon interprets the many films taken of public parades and ­ceremonies as considered interventions into a broader process of affirming and renegotiating the concept of community, which was taking places in certain areas of the industrial North in response to the pressures of modernity. Richard Brown (2005) has emphasised the significance of local context to an even greater degree, arguing that certain stylistically pioneering films made by the Bamforth Company can be understood in part as responses to particular issues of current civic concern in the small Yorkshire town of Holmfirth where they were produced. There is surely considerable scope and need for further work of this nature.

1907–1918 British film pioneering reached a summit of achievement at such an early age that its subsequent decline must form the embarrassing theme of this second period … The infant prodigy’s promise had led not to a glorious maturity but to a state of arrested development, and the years 1906 to 1914 show two phases, first a humiliating period of stagnation, and after 1911 a noticeable but only partly successful effort, broken by the coming of war, to re‐establish the former status of British ­production … Film producers in America, Italy and France, chasing the future with all the zest the British had previously shown, put this country to shame, and by 1911 British ­production was oppressed by a feeling of inferiority which subsequent efforts  had not succeeded in removing when they were interrupted by the war. (Low 1949, pp. 92–93)

Rachael Low’s (1914–1918) volume of the History of the British Film has nothing more positive to say about British film production in the war years either, claiming that it was ‘unfortunately of a very poor quality, and both the increasing number of companies in production and the mass of inferior films on the market were repeatedly deplored’ (1950, p. 50).1 It would take another 50 years before any further monographs on the subject of British cinema in the 1910s were published. This long gap can be partly attributed to the quality of Low’s research and the fact that it could not be easily superseded. But it is also no doubt a consequence of the depressing picture Low painted of the failure and incompetence of British ­f ilmmakers in this period, which gives the clear impression that their work simply would not merit revisiting.

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A concerted effort to ascertain if this verdict was fair began in earnest in the aftermath of the centenary of cinema commemorations. Partly in response to the reluctance of the Giornate del Cinema Muto (the annual international silent cinema festival held in Pordenone, Italy) to programme British films, an annual festival of British silent cinema was launched in 1998 in Leicester. It has continued in some form (in a variety of locations) every year since, and reached its 18th edition in 2015. Most of the events have involved a mixture of screenings and research papers, and six volumes of proceedings have been published (Burton and Porter 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003; Porter and Dixon 2007; Hammond and Williams 2011). This process of re‐appraisal has applied different evaluative criteria to those used by Low. In common with many of her generation – whose introduction to film theory came largely via the translated writings of Soviet directors of the ­montage school – Low proceeded from the assumption that editing constitutes ‘the essence of film as an art form’ (1949, p. 248). She consequently showed little patience for films which failed to emulate the systems of parallel and analytical editing being developed by contemporaneous American directors like D.W.  Griffith. The first significant critical challenge to Low’s assessment emerged in Andrew Higson’s work on influential constructions of the idea of national cinema within British film history. Higson suggests that British filmmakers have ­persistently ­prioritised ‘the reproduction of literary texts, artefacts, and landscapes which already have a privileged status within the accepted definition of the national h ­ eritage’ (1995b, p. 27), and have consciously developed particular stylistic strategies to prominently foreground these elements. He has applied this framework to British cinema of the 1910s in a number of essays (e.g. 1995a, 1998) and has argued that a preference for long takes and abjuration of narrative economy are often the hallmarks of a considered pictorialist aesthetic rather than evidence of incompetence. Low expressed particular exasperation at the close relationship between British cinema and theatre in the 1910s, and protested against ‘the ultimate harm resulting from this unnatural dependence’ (1949, p. 131). This assessment was made from a  mid‐twentieth‐century perspective which saw the cinema as a radically new cultural enterprise, whose medium‐specific formal traits ought to make it autonomous from all other existing art forms (and thereby justify its dedicated study). More recently, however, scholars have proposed a view of the emergence of cinema ­internationally as a profoundly ‘intermedial’ process and encouraged the writing of ‘a history of cinema that takes into strict account… the dependence of cinema on other mediums and cultural spheres’ (Gaudreault 2000, p. 14). The development of intermediality as a critical paradigm has helped to encourage an unashamed focus on the study of silent British cinema’s many imbrications with the stage (e.g. Fitzsimmons and Street 2000). Burrows (2003) argues that the prolific involvement of leading theatre stars in British films of the 1910s did not simply entail a deferral to established traditions, and that it was used to facilitate experimentation, expansion, and an exploration of various possibilities which the technology of cinema offered for reconfiguring the circulation and consumption of culture. The impact of these kinds of films has been shown to be significantly more extensive than



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p­ reviously imagined, for example, Musser (2004) shows how Ernst Lubitsch’s (1925) film version of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan is profoundly indebted to a forgotten British film adaptation of the same play made in 1916. In other respects, however, Low’s work has remained an important model for research on this period. From the second volume onwards, the most striking aspect of the History of the British Film series is arguably its very catholic ­understanding of what constitutes film history. Unlike any contemporaneous studies, Low’s sought to document British film culture in its broadest sense, rather than simply as the story of film production. Thus, one finds extensive and carefully researched sections dedicated to the evolution of the film exhibition and distribution sectors, the internal politics of the industry, and also the public ­reputation of the cinema (encompassing observations and campaigns by moral reform movements and leading educationalists). Judged simply by volume of work, it would appear that most modern scholars share Low’s conviction that the most interesting fields of investigation concerning British cinema in the 1910s lie outside of native studios: the majority of books, journal articles, and doctoral theses dealing with this period focus upon the kinds of changes in industrial organisation, exhibition practices, and forms of audience reception which ­ occurred as the cinema in this country acquired a mass following. There have been detailed studies dealing, for example, with the provision of music in British cinemas (Brown and Davison 2013), regional film distribution (Vélez‐Serna 2012), the regional exhibition of Kinemacolor films ( Jackson 2011), the importance of the cinema for the Italian immigrant community in London (Ercole 2008), early British film fan magazines (Bryan 2006), and the impact of cinema as a new cultural institution on British modernist writers (Shail 2012). The transformation of film exhibition and audience engagement in the late 1900s and 1910s has for some time been a particularly vibrant area of research in the study of silent American cinema, and the equivalent scholarship in Britain has started to closely mirror its trans‐Atlantic counterparts by concentrating upon regional case studies. Three large Arts and Humanities Research Council grants have funded studies of Edwardian film exhibition in regional contexts within the last 10 years, in addition to existing studies of 1910’s film exhibition trends in London (Burrows 2004a, b), Southampton (Hammond 2006), and Scotland (Griffiths 2012). There is a compelling methodological logic behind this trend: as the silent era cinemagoing experience was more profoundly shaped by local ­exhibition practices than in later decades, one universal model definitely cannot be applied in all cases, and the time and effort required to adequately survey regional newspapers can make it unfeasible to widen the research net on a single project. Nonetheless, it could be objected that insufficient work has been conducted in recent years on the broader national picture to help recognise and measure the ­significance of regional variations. The most extensive and influential work to date on dominant nationwide trends in the evolution of the film exhibition sector in Britain in the 1910s is a series of essays written by the newspaper historian, Nicholas Hiley (1995, 1998, 2002). Hiley has

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g­ enerated a significant array of statistical data (mostly via conjectural extrapolation) about the volume and geographical spread of cinema building. He has u ­ tilised these figures, in combination with sceptical coverage of the industry found in popular newspapers of the time, to advance a very striking hypothesis: that prior to the First World War the scale of provision of cinemas in Britain was considerably in excess of the level of public demand for this form of recreation. Hiley contends that the ­eagerness of middle‐class investors to speculate within the entertainment industry capital market led to their exploitation by unscrupulous company promoters, who secured finance for thousands of cinemas that the public had little interest in visiting. According to this account, by 1914, ‘most British exhibitors must have been showing to largely empty halls’ (2002, p. 122), and it was only the outbreak of war which saved the industry by creating a large surge in patronage as a result of changed social ­conditions. This provocative argument has been happily accepted as fact by many scholars (e.g. Hanson 2007; Shail 2012), though it has been objected that available data concerning cinema company registrations and liquidations does not support such extreme conclusions (Burrows and Brown 2010), and a ground‐breaking study of Scottish film culture in the first half of the twentieth century disputes the idea that major spikes in wartime attendance are widely evident (Griffiths 2012, pp. 98–103). One important study of the reception of certain key genres among wartime audiences does make a persuasive case that this period witnessed various ­momentous changes for the film industry in other respects. Hammond (2006) ­suggests that for the first time the programme content of fixed‐site cinemas was arranged with a confident and justifiable expectation of attracting patronage from a very wide range of social classes. He shows, furthermore, that during this period the cinema was definitively accepted by influential legislators, regulators, and moral watchdogs as a valid national pastime – this, paradoxically, in spite of the fact that, during the Great War, American films began for the first time to o ­ verwhelmingly dominate the British market. Hammond also suggests that this legitimation of the cinema’s social role was accompanied by a shift in the way that it was conceptualised: influential expectations that it was naturally fitted and t­ ideologically obliged to assume a utilitarian role as a medium of information ­dissemination and education were overshadowed by overwhelming evidence that its dominant use had become fixed as that of a medium of entertainment and d­ istraction; this function was nevertheless seen as a helpful and useful one at a time of national crisis.

1918–1929 Rachael Low’s assessment of the merits and achievements of silent British film production in the post‐war era finds similar cause for regret and embarrassment as the two preceding volumes of her historical survey. Older firms which survived into the 1920s are seen to have lacked sufficient capital to compete effectively with



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imported Hollywood productions, while newer, larger enterprises which came to prominence, such as the Stoll Film Company, placed too much faith in adapting successful novels for the screen and ‘good equipment could not overcome unsuitable stories mechanically adapted’ (1971, p. 125). A particular low point was reached at the end of 1924 when it was reported that production had ground to a halt in every studio, and the industry appeared to stand on the brink of complete obsolescence. A revival of hope and investment followed in the wake of the 1927 Cinematograph Act, which sought to protect the home industry by implementing a mandatory quota of British films which distributors and exhibitors had to handle, but Low suggests that this created new problems by simply ‘providing an opening for many producers of inferior calibre’ (p. 157). For a further three decades following the publication of the fourth volume of the ‘History of the British Film’ project, the only British filmmaker of the 1920s to receive serious scholarly attention was Alfred Hitchcock. Low’s criticisms were more emphatically embellished in a relatively recent book‐length study of British film production in the 1920s. Kenton Bamford argues that the native industry ­condemned itself to abject failure through its own ‘wearisome litany of middle‐class prejudices’ (1999, p. 74), which prevented any meaningful engagement with the tastes of a mass audience. Bamford seems to have based his analysis on the evidence of selected hostile newspaper reviews rather than any film viewing, and it must be said that his critique is significantly less balanced and nuanced than Low’s. Writing when François Truffaut’s notorious claim that Britain and cinema were somehow fundamentally incompatible was still fresh in the mind, Low was careful to provide a considered and sympathetic explanation of the manifold structural and economic handicaps with which the British film industry wrestled. She identifies class prejudice as part of the problem, but only in the sense that it helped to create a situation in which British filmmakers faced incessant vitriol from influential voices at home. The 1920s saw the emergence of a new generation of writers and critics who took the cinema very seriously as a means of artistic expression, but Low suggests that ‘because of their background and upbringing they tended to have a certain veneration for abroad as the natural home of taste and culture, and an attitude of condescension to the predominantly lower and lower middle‐ class British film industry’ (1971, p. 305). Considerable scholarly attention has since been paid to those in Britain who were concerned to develop early forms of film theory, in the form of essays (e.g. Samson 1986; Turvey 2002; Wasson 2002), books (Marcus 2007; Sexton 2008), and a critical anthology of important writings (Donald et al. 1999). Low’s characterisation of such writers as a patronising elite coterie has been increasingly challenged in this  work. Sexton focuses on experimental forms of film production in this period, but argues that ‘alternative film culture did have an effect on commercial British cinema, which demonstrates how the “alternative” and “mainstream” are not mutually exclusive spheres’ (2008, p. 164). Marcus’s study observes that some of the most important women who wrote about the cinema in the 1920s,

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like Iris Barry, C.A. Lejeune, and Dorothy Richardson, occupied shifting positions when it came to documenting the tastes and experiences of popular female audiences, alternating between haughty disapproval and sympathetic identification (2007, pp. 292–310). Michael Williams’s (2003) study of the star persona of Ivor Novello, the leading British matinee idol in this period, also identifies a complex interplay between high cultural discourses and the promotional mechanisms of the commercial film industry. Williams explains the appeal of Novello’s characteristic blend of luminous beauty and abject suffering in his star image with reference to a pronounced contemporary interest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and, in particular, the latter’s interpretation of the mythological figures of Apollo and Dionysus as symbolic icons through which Ancient Greek society articulated trauma and suffering. Williams argues that these twin polarities became important reference points in post‐war British society, and numerous cultural acts of commemoration of the horrors of the First World War were thus structured around them. Similar imagery is traced in several of Novello’s film roles; a fascination with the Apolline qualities of Novello’s ‘luminously’ beautiful face is linked to discourses surrounding the introduction of cosmetic surgery after the war, while the Dionysal strand in Novello’s films – his typically wracked, suffering body – is seen to connect to specific post‐war fears about the nature of ‘feminised’ British masculinity and contemporary attempts to understand the phenomenon of shell‐shock. This work has been followed by a series of rich and fruitful reflections on various different ways in which forms of memorialisation and remembrance of the war were undertaken in British cinema of the 1920s (e.g. Gledhill 2011; Haggith 2011; Napper 2011; Sargeant 2011b; Williams 2011; Botting 2015). One of the most intriguing attempts to position British cinema of the 1920s within changing matrices of class and culture is Lawrence Napper’s (2009) study of how and why native filmmaking in the interwar period came to be informed by a ‘middlebrow’ sensibility. Napper sees the formation of a perceived middle ground between high and lowbrow art as a phenomenon central to various other areas of cultural activity in Britain during this period, and the book is structured as a series of case studies which examine how British cinema both adapted and catalysed ideas about national identity and cultural taste that were concurrently being explored in the spheres of literature, radio, theatre, and early television. Several of these case studies concern films of the 1930s, but the book begins by examining the debates about national cinema which led to the implementation of the 1927 Cinematograph Act, and explores the relationship between the film and publishing industries in Britain via a study of The Constant Nymph (1927) – the film adaptation of a bestselling novel about the friction between artistic ideals and social responsibilities. Napper argues that the dominant retrospective perception of middlebrow cinema as a highly reactionary production trend fails to recognise that the idea of the middlebrow first emerged in this period as a radical concept which progressively revolutionised the ways in which traditional forms of art were consumed.



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In  this account, it served to blur the boundaries both of different media and ­existing class‐based stratifications of taste. It would undoubtedly be of considerable benefit to the future study of this period if Napper’s understanding of the middlebrow were to become as habitual a reference point as the notion of ­heritage cinema. The most extensive and ambitious attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of British cinema in the 1920s has been undertaken by Christine Gledhill, who has sought to provide a ‘cultural poetics of British filmmaking’ (2003, p. 2) and thereby identify a nationally distinct aesthetic paradigm. She does not attempt to displace or contest the status of Low’s book as the standard factual reference work in the field. But where the latter perceived a straightforward deficit of nerve and skill, Gledhill argues that British silent filmmakers did not so much fail to emulate the brisk continuity editing, expressionist mise‐en‐scène, and popular star systems of their overseas rivals as they actively resisted such trends in favour of a quite different set of stylistic principles. She contends that theories of the cinematic shared by native filmmakers and critics were shaped by culturally embedded aesthetic ideals drawn principally from the legacy bequeathed by popular Victorian theatre and also the nineteenth‐century representational tradition of pictorialism, which, before colonising the cinema, had previously forged important intermedial alliances between the dramatic, literary, and figurative arts. Gledhill marshals a wide range of evidence to suggest that British cinema of the 1920s cannot be adequately understood or appreciated without an awareness of these cultural reference points. Various individual case studies dotted throughout the book serve to represent previously reviled or substantially ignored film directors and actors such as Maurice Elvey, Graham Cutts, George Pearson, Guy Newall, Henry Edwards, and Matheson Lang as screen practitioners of substance who demonstrated no little thoughtfulness and flair in the way that they negotiated a fusion between the specificities of the newer medium and the deep‐rooted representational principles of stage melodrama and a broader pictorialist inheritance. The field of silent film studies has for some time been concerned to reiterate and flesh out Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of the medium as one of the most conspicuous symbols and transformational agents of modernity, so in this context it is a rather non‐conformist step on Gledhill’s part to emphasise continuities with a nineteenth‐century worldview rather than radical upheavals in taste and perception, and to suggest that any seemingly retrogressive return to preceding traditions ‘must be investigated as itself a response to modernity, rather than a failure of modernist imagination’ (2003, p. 2). There are inevitably contentious elements in such an undertaking. In historiographical terms, Gledhill takes a very long view in contextualising her subject: the first half of the book spends considerably more time explicating aesthetic and ideological debates in the era from c. 1850 to 1900 than it does situating British film production within equivalent discourses of the early twentieth century, and thus it does not clearly explain how pictorialism may have continued to appear as an attractive and meaningful visual

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paradigm for both filmmakers and audiences. There is also a disconnect between this account of an apparently confident and fully realised national style of filmmaking and Gledhill’s acknowledgement of the fact that the system of industrial production in this period was itself ‘extremely unstable’ (2003, p. 123). Although Gledhill emphasises the fact that ‘no study of a national cinema can assume a hermetically sealed cultural space’ (2003, p. 5), there are no analogies or references made in the book to any contemporary European films or broader developments on the continent. This is somewhat surprising given both that a powerful influence of theatrical pictorialism has previously been identified in European cinema of the 1910s (Brewster and Jacobs 1997), and also because, as Low first pointed out, this period of British filmmaking was prominently characterised by ‘a new form of internationalism’ in which native directors made films in European studios to try and absorb new techniques and help secure overseas distribution, and ‘more foreign stars and technicians came to swell the output of the new British studios, Continental visitors to a large extent replacing the Americans of earlier years’ (1971, p. 159). Some of the most illuminating literature on the British film industry in the 1920s is consequently to be found in an important anthology on the fashion for European co‐productions in this era (Higson and Maltby 1999; see also Bergfelder and Cargnelli 2008). One of the most underdeveloped areas of scholarship as far as the post‐war period is concerned is the study of mainstream British film culture beyond the sphere of production. There are some significant essays on trends in film exhibition and reception (Hiley 1999; Griffiths 2012), along with detailed studies of film censorship practices (Kuhn 1988; Lewis 2002), British Pathé’s cinemagazine for women, Eve’s Film Review (Hammerton 2001), and the place of cinema in the everyday lives of both ordinary women and female writers (Stead 2011), but the volume of such work is still relatively small compared with equivalent research on the 1910s. The film exhibition and distribution sectors underwent significant change and tribulation in the 1920s. It is reported in the film industry trade press of the time that ‘the worst slump [in audience attendance] in the history of the business’ was experienced in Britain in 1921–1922 (Tilley 1922), yet at the time of writing one struggles to find so much as a passing reference in the current literature to this apparently momentous crisis, let alone an adequate investigation of its causes and effects. The above discussion has outlined two basic paradigms which are operative in the study of the British film industry in the 1910 and 1920s: one consists of attempts to rehabilitate its reputation as an important and accomplished producer of mainstream films, while the other has effectively identified the analysis of Britain as an important market for the consumption of films as a more fruitful avenue of enquiry. One way of examining a meaningfully linked circuit of production, exhibition, and reception in silent‐era Britain would be further research into what has been called ‘useful cinema’ (Acland and Wasson 2011), i.e. the educational and propagandistic employment of moving images by social institutions and business



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organisations to serve particular instrumental aims. There is obviously a voluminous literature on the Documentary Movement in Britain, but comparatively little research has been undertaken on pre‐Grierson actuality filmmaking in the UK, and much of this is the work of two individual scholars ploughing a lonely furrow (e.g. Bottomore 1980, 1995, 1997, 2002; McKernan 1992, 2000, 2009, 2013). There are signs of a productive shift towards a more concerted examination of ‘useful cinema’ produced in Britain during the silent era in some of the outputs of the Colonial Film project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (Grieveson and McCabe 2011) and an equally recent study of William Lever’s use of advertising films (Sargeant 2011a). There were extensive reflections published in Britain throughout this period on cinema’s potential as a medium for education (e.g. Horne 1919; Marchant 1925) and the scope for further research within this particular field is considerable.

Note 1 It should be noted that these were somewhat revisionist claims in the 1940s: it had been alleged earlier in the decade – against a background of bitter post‐war trade disputes between Hollywood and the British Treasury – that Britain had only been demoted from a well‐earned position of international pre‐eminence in the film industry by the economic disruption caused by the First World War and the unfair eagerness of American companies to exploit this moment of weakness.

References Acland, Charles R and Wasson, Haidee (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Allister, Ray (1948). Friese‐Greene: Close‐up of an Inventor. London: Marsland. Bamford, Kenton (1999). Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s. London: I.B. Tauris. Barnes, John (1976). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Barnes, John (1983). The Rise of Cinema in Great Britain. London: Bishopsgate Press. Barnes, John (1988). Pioneers of the British Film. London: Bishopsgate Press. Barnes, John (1993). Filming the Boer War. London: Bishopsgate Press. Barnes, John (1997). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901  –  Volume 5: 1900. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Bergfelder Tim and Cargnelli, Christian (eds.) (2008). Destination London: German‐Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. New York: Berghahn Books. Botting, Jo (2015). “A war film with a difference”: Adrian Brunel’s Blighty and negotiation within the British studio system of the late silent period. Journal of British Cinema and Television 12 (2): 151–171.

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Bottomore, Stephen (1980). Frederic Villiers – war correspondent. Sight and Sound 49 (4): 250–255. Bottomore, Stephen (1995). “An amazing quarter of moving gold, gems and genealogy”: filming India’s 1902/03 Delhi Durbar. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15 (4): 495–515. Bottomore, Stephen (1997). “Have you seen the Gaekwar Bob?”: Filming the 1911 Delhi durbar. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 17 (3): 309–345. Bottomore, Stephen (2002). Projecting for the Lord: the work of Wilson Carlile. Film History 14 (2): 196–209. Brewster, Ben and Jacobs, Lea (1997). Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Julie and Davison, Annette (eds.) (2013). The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Richard (1996). Marketing the cinématographe in Britain. In: Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future (ed. Christopher Williams), 63–71. London: BFI Publishing/University of Westminster Press. Brown, Richard (2004). New Century Pictures: regional enterprise in early British film exhibition. In: The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (ed.  Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell), 69–82. London: BFI Publishing. Brown, Richard (2005). Film and postcards  –  cross‐media symbiosis in early Bamforth films. In: Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception (ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple), 236–251. Eastleigh: John Libbey. Brown, Richard and Anthony, Barry (1999). A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Bryan, Jane. (2006). ‘The cinema looking glass: the British film fan magazine, 1911–1918’. PhD diss., University of East Anglia. Burch, Noël (1990). Life to Those Shadows (trans. and ed. Ben Brewster). London: BFI Publishing. Burrows, Jon (2003). Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908–1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Burrows, Jon (2004a). Penny pleasures: film exhibition in London during the nickelodeon era, 1906–1914. Film History 16 (1): 60–91. Burrows, Jon (2004b). Penny pleasures II: indecency, anarchy and junk film in London’s “nickelodeons”, 1906–1914. Film History 16 (2): 172–197. Burrows, Jon (2010). West is best; or, what we can learn from Bournemouth. Early Popular Visual Culture 8 (4): 351–362. Burrows, Jon and Brown, Richard (2010). Financing the Edwardian cinema boom, 1909– 1914. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 30 (1): 1–20. Burton, Alan and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2000). Pimple, Pranks & Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1930. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Burton, Alan and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2001). The Showman, the Spectacle & the Two‐Minute Silence. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Burton, Alan and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2002). Crossing the Pond: Anglo‐American Film Relations Before 1930. Trowbridge: Flicks Books.



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Burton, Alan and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2003). Scene Stealing: Sources for British Cinema Before 1930. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Chanan, Michael (1996). The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, 2e. London: Routledge. Cinquegrani, Maurizio (2014). Of Empire and the City: Remapping Early British Cinema. Bern: Peter Lang. Coe, Brian (1969a). William Friese Greene and the origins of cinematography I. Screen 10 (2): 25–41. Coe, Brian (1969b). William Friese Greene and the origins of cinematography II. Screen 10 (3): 72–83. Coe, Brian (1969c). William Friese Greene and the origins of cinematography III. Screen 10 (4–5): 129–147. Donald, James, Friedberg, Anne, and Marcus, Laura (eds.) (1999). Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism. London: Cassell. Ercole, Pierluigi. (2008). ‘Ethnic audiences and film culture: Italian immigrants, cultural identity, and the distribution of Italian films in London at the beginning of the 20th century’. PhD diss., University of East Anglia. Fitzsimmons, Linda and Street, Sarah (eds.) (2000). Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s to 1920s. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Gaudreault, André (2000). The diversity of cinematographic connections in the intermedial context of the turn of the 20th century. In: Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple), 8–15. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Gledhill, Christine (2003). Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion. London: BFI Publishing. Gledhill, Christine (2011). Remembering the war in 1920s British cinema. In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 94–108. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, Frank (2004). The Kiss in the Tunnel (1895), G.A. Smith and the emergence of the edited film in England. In: The Silent Cinema Reader (ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer), 51–62. London: Routledge. Grieveson, Lee and McCabe, Colin (eds.) (2011). Empire and Film. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths, Trevor (2012). The Cinema and Cinema‐Going in Scotland, 1896–1950. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Gunning, Tom (1990). The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avantgarde. In: Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker), 56–62. London: BFI Publishing. Gunning, Tom (2005). Modernity and early cinema. In: Encyclopaedia of Early Cinema (ed. Richard Abel), 439–442. London: Routledge. Haggith, Toby (2011). The dead, battlefield burials and the unveiling of war memorials in films of the Great War era’. In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 145–159. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammerton, Jenny (2001). For Ladies Only? Eve’s Film Review: Pathe Cinemagazine, 1921–33. Hastings: Projection Box.

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Hammond, Michael (2006). The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War 1914–1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Hammond, Michael and Williams, Michael (eds.) (2011). British Silent Cinema and the Great War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanson, Stuart (2007). From Silent Screen to Multi‐Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hendricks, Gordon (1961). The Edison Motion Picture Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Higson, Andrew (1995a). The victorious recycling of national history: Nelson. In: Film and the First World War (ed. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp), 108–115. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Higson, Andrew (1995b). Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, Andrew (1998). Heritage discourses and British cinema before 1920. In: Celebrating 1895: Proceedings of the International Conference on Film Before 1920 (ed. John Fullerton), 182–189. Eastleigh: John Libbey. Higson, Andrew (ed.) (2002). Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Higson, Andrew and Maltby, Richard (eds.) (1999). “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Hiley, Nicholas (1995). The British cinema auditorium. In: Film and the First World War (ed. Karel Dibets and Bert Hogenkamp), 160–170. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Hiley, Nicholas (1998). “At the Picture Palace”: the British cinema audience, 1895–1920. In: Celebrating 1895: Proceedings of the International Conference on Film Before 1920 (ed. John Fullerton), 96–103. Eastleigh: John Libbey. Hiley, Nicholas (1999). Let’s go to the pictures: the British cinema audience in the 1920s and 1930s. Journal of Popular British Cinema 2: 39–53. Hiley, Nicholas (2002). Nothing more than a “craze”: cinema building in Britain from 1909 to 1914. In: Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930 (ed. Andrew Higson), 111–127. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Horne, Mary C (1919). The Cinema in Education and as an Amusement and Entertainment. London: The Challenge. Jackson, Victoria. (2011). ‘The distribution and exhibition of Kinemacolor in the UK and USA, 1909–1916’. PhD diss., University of Bristol. Kember, Joe (2009). Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Kuhn, Annette (1988). Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925. London: Routledge. Lewis, Sian (2002). ‘Local government and film censorship: the control of film exhibition in England and Wales, 1909–1939’. PhD diss., University of Bristol. Low, Rachael (1949). The History of the British Film: 1906–1914. London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, Rachael (1950). The History of the British Film: 1914–1918. London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, Rachael (1971). The History of the British Film: 1918–1929. London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, Rachael and Manvell, Roger (1948). The History of the British Film: 1896–1906. London: George Allen & Unwin.



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Maltby, Richard (1997). Introduction. In: The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894– 1901 – Volume 5: 1900 (ed. John Barnes), xi–xxxii. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Marchant, James (ed.) (1925). The Cinema in Education: Being the Report of the Psychological Investigation Conducted by Special Sub‐committees Appointed by the Cinema Commission of Enquiry. London: George Allen & Unwin. Marcus, Laura (2007). The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKernan, Luke (1992). Topical Budget: The Great British News Film. London: BFI Publishing. McKernan, Luke (2000). The great white silence: Antarctic exploration and film. In: South: The Race to the Pole (ed. AT Kearney), 91–103. London: National Maritime Museum. McKernan, Luke (2009). “The modern elixir of life”: Kinemacolor, royalty and the Delhi Durbar. Film History 21 (2): 122–136. McKernan, Luke (2013). Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non‐fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Musser, Charles (1991). Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press. Musser, Charles (2004). The hidden and the unspeakable: on theatrical culture, Oscar Wilde and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Film Studies 4: 12–47. Napper, Lawrence (2009). British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Napper, Lawrence (2011). Remembrance, re‐membering and recollection: Walter Summers and the British war film of the 1920s. In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 109–117. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nowell‐Smith, Geoffrey (ed.) (2012). Foundation and early years. In: The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000 (ed. Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith and Christophe Dupin), 14–27. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Porter, Laraine and Dixon, Bryony (eds.) (2007). Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema Before 1930. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Ramsaye, Terry (1926). A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rotha, Paul (1930). The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape. Sadoul, Georges (1946). Early film production in England: the origin of montage, close‐ ups and chase sequence (trans. Yvonne Templin). Hollywood Quarterly I (3): 249–259. Salt, Barry (1978). Film Form, 1900–06. Sight and Sound XLVII (3): 148–153. Samson, Jen (1986). The Film Society, 1925–1939. In: All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (ed. Charles Barr), 306–313. London: BFI Publishing. Sargeant, Amy (2011a). Lever, Lifebuoy and Ivory. Early Popular Visual Culture 9 (1): 37–55. Sargeant, Amy (2011b). “A victory and a defeat as glorious as a victory”: The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927). In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 79–93. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sexton, Jamie (2008). Alternative Film Culture in Inter‐War Britain. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Shail, Andrew (2012). The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism. New York: Routledge.

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Sopocy, Martin (1998). James Williamson: Studies and Documents of a Pioneer of the Film Narrative. London: Associated University Presses. Stead, Lisa. (2011). ‘Women’s writing and British female film culture in the silent era’. PhD diss., University of Exeter. Tilley, Frank A (1922). The story of the year. In: Kinematograph Year Book 1922. London: Kinematograph Weekly. Toulmin, Vanessa (2006). Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection. London: BFI Publishing. Turvey, Gerry (2002). Towards a critical practice: Ivor Montagu and British film culture in the 1920s. In: Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930 (ed. Andrew Higson), 306–320. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Vélez‐Serna, Maria. (2012). ‘Film distribution in Scotland before 1918’. PhD diss., University of Glasgow. Wasson, Haidee (2002). Writing the cinema into daily life: Iris Barry and the emergence of British film criticism in the 1920s. In: Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896– 1930 (ed. Andrew Higson), 321–337. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Williams, Michael (2003). Ivor Novello: Screen Idol. London: BFI Publishing. Williams, Michael (2011). “Fire, blood and steel”: memory and spectacle in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928). In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 118–133. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cinema in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1930s Kevin Rockett

Introduction Cinema arrived in Ireland at a time when the anti‐colonial struggle had reached a decisive stage, thus differentiating Ireland’s experience of the cinema from most western European and North American countries. Consequently, the methodological paradigms of early and silent cinema that have proved dominant in exploring American and British cinemas, the two national cinemas of most relevance to a discussion of cinema in Ireland, may not always have the same traction in Ireland. While the application of formalist analysis to American narrative cinema held sway from the 1970s, it was the turn to cinema history in the 1980s (Allen and Gomery 1985) combined with a ‘contextual approach [that] uses history to read texts and texts to read history’ (Kellner 1995, p. 59) which have proven the most fruitful in exploring early Irish film history (Rockett 1987). The accelerating cultural nationalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its developing political and military forms, were almost destined to clash with the cinema, insofar as cinema was another medium in a long line of imported popular cultural forms that many of those committed to a separatist Irish nation were persuaded was anathema to the Republican cause. Since the eighteenth century, British, but particularly English, popular visual culture had proved to be a measurement against which the worthiness of indigenous culture was often determined. Consequently, cinema, like other forms of ‘foreign’ cultural expression, was likely to become locked in an anti‐colonial (and later post‐colonial) binary with nationalism and its religious and moral companion, Catholicism. That the cultural nationalist campaign coincided with the introduction of ­projected

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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moving pictures went on to create a frisson that has been read all too lightly as if the battle was between the Gaelic oral and written world and a previously unexperienced imported visual culture. The gap in the history of imported popular visual entertainments in Ireland prior to the cinema was only filled in 2011 with the publication of a history in Ireland of the magic lantern and the panorama, among other such shows, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in a reassessment of the relationship between visual culture and oral and written culture in Ireland (Rockett and Rockett 2011a). What this study established was that, for the century and more before the arrival of cinema, Ireland was saturated with all types of popular visual entertainments in a manner similar to that available to the British population. The main difference between the two countries was not that Irish people were denied the opportunity to see magic lantern shows or view large‐scale panorama paintings, but that the subject‐matter on view was almost exclusively imported. While it can be argued that the visceral or other kinds of experience on offer at such shows, as in the case of cinema, could to a degree transcend the actual content of a show, it was, nevertheless, not lost on Irish audiences that the endless ­jingoistic, empiricist, and military subjects depicted in panorama paintings were alien to their national aspirations. As would be the case during Boer War stage and film shows in Dublin at the end of the century, panorama shows, too, were on the receiving end of criticism even from publications not noted for their nationalist sympathies. Magic lantern and panorama shows were added to by the familiar repertoire of Thomas Edison’s audio‐visual entertainments: first, the phonograph in 1878 and then the kinetoscope in 1895, which set the scene for the widespread availability of projected moving pictures following the first such show in Dublin on 20 April 1896, exactly two months after the London debut of the Lumières’ Cinématographe. Quickly, cinematographe shows were incorporated into music‐hall programmes, travelling fairground attractions, and, by the early 1900s, lengthy film‐only seasons were running in prestigious Dublin venues. In this, the Irish experience differs little from other countries, or, perhaps, more accurately, from British regional centres, which, like Dublin and Belfast, would gravitate towards London as the dominant metropolitan centre supplying it with films. (Indeed, during the classical cinema era and beyond Ireland was treated by distribution companies as a regional centre akin to Glasgow or Birmingham.) A key question, though, was whether space could be carved out in this volatile environment for an indigenous Irish cinema. While the earliest moving picture images of Dublin date from 1897, like much of early – and, indeed, later – film, the person behind the camera was not Irish (but, in this case, French). Indeed, for the first 20 years of the ‘cinema’, almost all such images of Ireland and the Irish were produced by non‐Irish filmmakers, such as the British company Mitchell and Kenyon (Toulmin 2006). As a relatively small country positioned beside its colonial master, which enjoyed something of a ‘golden era’ during cinema’s first decade, the issue for Irish separatists was how to



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detach the nation from its social, economic, political, and cultural dependence on the British Empire. In that regard, cinema was seen to belong to a long line of objectionable imports that were not just imperialist in character but also morally problematic for a resurgent Irish Catholicism in the nineteenth century. These concerns found a focus in popular cultural and media events such as the salacious reporting of divorce cases in English Sunday newspapers; the music hall’s risqué banter and exposed flesh; increasingly explicit novels, popular and otherwise; and, of course, the cinema’s representation of the family and sexuality as fiction came to eclipse actuality/non‐fiction subjects by 1910. Yet, cinema offers a countervailing trajectory to insular perspectives and, as a result, the dominant view of Catholic and conservative cultural nationalist negative attitudes to imported popular culture can to a degree be recalibrated through positioning cinema as an internationalising and modernising force (Gunning 2005). Cinema, like other ‘modern’ cultural forms, brought new experiences of the urban and modern that have a long lineage in Ireland as well as elsewhere. Even though Ireland remained a predominantly rural and agricultural society into the second half of the twentieth century, thus limiting access to regular cinema‐going, even in the classical era, for large swathes of the population, nevertheless, the experience of modernity, or of the Enlightenment in the broadest sense, permeated society. The 1798 republican insurrection, after all, was a direct result of such awareness. Consequently, the new forms of cultural expression, such as the rapid paced ­editing of magic lantern shows, a precursor of the cinema experience, were available to all classes in Ireland by the middle of the nineteenth century. As an experience of the cultural conditions of modernity, popular cultural and literary forms were widely available, and it can be said that Ireland’s major cities only differed in the scale and intensity of sensational experience available to them compared to their metropolitan counterparts in Britain, the USA, and even throughout the urban centres of Europe’s various empires (Singer 1995). Yet, unlike the Anglo‐American experience (Hansen 1991; McKernan 2007), what limited information is available on early cinema audiences in Ireland and their viewing habits suggests it was largely a middle‐class experience during the 1900s (Rockett & Rockett 2011a), with ‘realist’ material (travelogues and other short ‘documentaries’) rather than visceral spectacle or ‘attractions’‐based narratives (Gunning 1990) dominating. Nevertheless, it may be that the absence of Irish cinema records or audience profiles for the early cinema period similar to those available for American neighbourhood cinemas ought not to be read as suggesting a completely different Irish experience, merely that strict parallels between the countries are never likely to be able to made with confidence. Having said that, though, further research needs to be undertaken at a local, provincial level similar to that which has been initiated in Scotland (Caughie 2015). Furthermore, the technical and formal innovators so evident in early British cinema (Low and Manvell 1948; Barnes 1976, 1983, 1988) – Robert Paul and other British pioneers who had a more lasting presence in Ireland that their French counterparts – are

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almost wholly absent in the Irish context. More broadly, though, even if the balance between ‘attractions’ and ‘realism’ can never be fully established, it remains the case that the early (to 1907) and transition (1907–1917) stages of cinema offered an  increasingly rich reservoir of formal experiences that differentiated cinema from other popular cultural forms. That James Joyce would draw on the editing techniques of the cinema for his ground‐breaking modernist novel, Ulysses (1922), set in Dublin in 1904, and that it was he was who opened Ireland’s first full‐time cinema in 1909, reminds us that the experience offered by the cinema to the general population and intellectuals alike was of the fracturing of inherited cultural modes. It is perhaps all the more disappointing in reviewing the early decades of cinema in Ireland that the modernist challenge offered by the cinema did not find its way into Irish cinema either through representations of the urban (though a few such film inserts were produced) or the breaking of the stranglehold of the traditional realist literary form. But, this nostalgia for a lost cinematic modernism in the face of classical cinema’s seamless narratives is little different to the British and American experiences. For most Irish filmmakers of the early period, though, there was a task that took precedence over all else: the political and military struggle against the colonial power.

Containing the Cinema Similar to Britain, if a little later, the first Irish cinema building boom was during 1910–1914 (the second one was in the 1930s), with 25 premises licensed for public exhibition in Dublin alone by the outbreak of the First World War. Like Britain, too, the profile of these entrepreneurs was of small to medium‐sized businessmen and middle‐class investors, some of whom had participated in the boom and bust skating rink phenomenon that gripped both islands during 1908–1910 (Hiley 2002 on Britain; Rockett and Rockett 2011b), while the increasingly lucrative Dublin and Belfast cinema markets proved of interest to the major British company, Provincial Cinematograph Theatres Ltd., which opened first‐run houses in the two cities ­during 1910–1911. With the wider availability of ever more challenging films, anti‐ cinema nationalist and Catholic campaigners alike set their sights on restricting the availability of what was perceived as culturally and morally damaging material. Central to the cultural nationalist project was the containment of imported popular culture. This found its first mass expression in a clerically‐orchestrated campaign initiated in 1911 to stop the selling of English Sunday newspapers because of their reporting of divorce cases, something anathema to conservative Catholics who held that the family was indissoluble. While this campaign had some success, the 1910s was used as a testing ground for post‐independence ­policies that would find expression in restrictive national legislation in the 1920s.



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Thus, when the content of cinema films came into focus for these ‘vigilance committee’ campaigners, the primary concern was with representations of the family, though the related issue of (often imagined) nudity in the cinema gave further impetus to the campaign. For these vigilance campaigners any representation which questioned the idealised notion of the nuclear family was to be suppressed. To try to achieve their aim, the country’s principal city council, Dublin, found itself pressurised by campaigners into appointing film censors in 1916 as a means of ensuring surveillance of the content of films shown in the city’s cinemas. Drawing its authority from the 1909 Cinematograph Act as was the case in Britain, the courts extended the law’s remit beyond the original public safety provisions in the Act to allow local authority censorship of the content of the films shown in their jurisdiction. Despite the rearguard efforts by exhibitor interests represented on the council, Dublin’s film censorship regime was put in the hands of lay vigilance campaigners, and representatives of Dublin’s Protestant and Catholic archbishops, while a large number of the councillors also appointed themselves film censors. It was a recipe for a shambolic operation which satisfied few, though 100 films were still banned during 1916–1922. As it was clear that Dublin’s censorship was not producing the desired effect– films were viewed, theatre‐style, while the film was already on public exhibition – campaigners turned their attention towards a national film censorship regime which would be introduced once independence was achieved. With the support of the First (pre‐independence) Dáil (Parliament) in 1920, and of a national film conference held at the same time as the Anglo–Irish Treaty was being debated in Ireland in December 1921, a broad‐based alliance of religious leaders met the Irish Free State’s first Minister for Home Affairs in February 1923 to press for national legislation. Within three months the Censorship of Films Bill was published and by the following month, June 1923, the proposal was enacted, thus detaching Ireland from the semi‐independent British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and the American film industry’s self‐regulation system. The Censorship of Films Act, 1923, lays down impressionistic criteria to determine if a film is suitable for public exhibition. If a film is deemed to be indecent, obscene, or blasphemous, or is considered contrary to public morality, then it is not to be given a censor’s certificate, a legal requirement for public exhibition. A civil servant, the Official Film Censor, is in sole charge of the office, subject only to appeals by distributors to a voluntary Censorship of Films Appeal Board, whose nine members have always included senior Catholic and Protestant ­clergymen. With film exhibition and distribution interests excluded from the appeal board’s membership, deviation from a conservative moral code was most unlikely during the early decades of its operation. However, distributors could not have envisaged what occurred following the appointment of a former employee of the Dublin Gas Co., James Montgomery, as Official Film Censor. Not only did Montgomery proudly declare he knew nothing about the cinema,

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but that he would take the ten Commandments as his code. When this ideological prescription was converted into policy, the distributors were shocked by the ­censor’s zeal. Montgomery declared that since the family was regarded as the basic unit of the  new state, then censorship policy should reflect this Catholic family ethos. As  a result, films which represented divorce, extra‐marital affairs, abortion, or homosexuality, as well as non‐traditional images of women, such as in night‐club scenes, especially when scantily‐clad in chorus lines, or even smoking or drinking alcohol, were either cut or the film banned altogether. Even before the end of 1924, his first full year in office, Montgomery faced a boycott from film distributors who withdrew their films from Ireland in the expectation that their action would lead to the easing of censorship. When Montgomery, with the support of the government, declared that they would rather have no films than the ones being rejected or cut, the distributors caved in, and there was no repeat of the action, even when it emerged that an average of 100 films were being banned annually during Montgomery’s 17‐year reign as Ireland’s official film censor (Rockett 2004). If the conservative moral attitude to imported films and their regulation demonstrates continuity from the pre‐ to post‐independence periods, the challenge for indigenous filmmakers was of an altogether different order.

Foreign Filmmaking in Ireland, 1910–1914 Ireland is marked, especially from the 1840s, by its diaspora. It was not just the genocidal scale of the Great Famine in which 1.1 million died, it was the outflow during 1846–1855 alone of 2.1 million people, of whom 1.8 million went to the USA, that impacted on cultural output, whether in magic lantern slides narratives, song‐writing, or popular stage shows in both Britain and America. The various forms had consistent Irish themes: they were sometimes sentimental memories of a lost but not forgotten land; they expressed the harshness of the exile’s life; or the more politically focused stories articulated the periodic struggles against colonial oppression. With the advent of cinema, new opportunities emerged for telling these tales in a more powerful way than the earlier, more static, forms allowed. The vast majority of the 600–700 fiction films made about the Irish during the silent period were concerned with the experience of the Irish in America as they sought to integrate into their new society while at the same time seeking to hold on to their cultural and national separateness (Shannon 2010). (As the much‐ written about area of Irish‐themed films set in the USA is the subject of another contribution to this volume, this issue is not explored here.) It was unsurprising that when the opportunity arose for one of the American company Kalem’s top directors, Irish‐Canadian director Sidney Olcott, to film abroad, he chose to go to Ireland, the land of his parents. Thus, in June 1910,



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Olcott, along with the experienced actress and writer Gene Gauntier, spent a few weeks in the country producing the very first fiction films made in Ireland, one of which survives, the one‐reel The Lad from Old Ireland. It is a story of how a poor agricultural labourer emigrates to New York, works as a hod‐carrier initially, but acquires wealth, is elected to political office, and, when reminded of the desperate plight of his sweetheart, arrives back in Ireland with his new largesse just in time to save her from eviction.1 It was a template that would find many imitators, but it should be recalled that most real‐life experiences did not see the migrant return to the native land, even though the most famous version of The Lad from Old Ireland story, The Quiet Man (1952), follows the earlier film’s narrative trajectory, down to leaving behind the symbol of modernity, the train, in order to enter the ‘real’ Ireland on his return, the countryside. When Lad enjoyed commercial success, Kalem sent Olcott back to Ireland with a larger crew and cast the following year and during an 18‐week stay made an impressive 17 films. The first of these, Rory O’More (1911), created another template that would be copied by American filmmakers who usually ­dispensed with the cost of making Irish‐themed films in Ireland by finding not always suitable substitute landscapes and ‘Irish’ buildings, interiors, and costumes in America. Rory O’More is the first significant Irish historical story, set as it is in the 1798–1803 insurrectionary period, but it is also only one of approximately 37 films about Irish history made during 1907–1915 (Rockett 2001) (Figure 2.1). The choice of the 1798–1803 period was motivated by two principal factors. First, it was the last period during which assertions of Irish republicanism were expressed in popular uprisings, while such stories fitted within developing action narrative forms. The film also built on the nineteenth‐century legacy in the theatre, literature, and popular song that celebrated those stirring events. A 1912 three‐reel version of the same story, For Ireland’s Sake, also made by Olcott in Ireland, ended with a famous refrain as the rebel escapes from his English captors: ‘To the West/To the West/To the Land of the Free’. It was a rallying cry that would have resonated with the huge numbers of Irish in America, the main market for such films, though they were also distributed in both Ireland and Britain. Despite their apparent support for Irish separatism, these films are less radical than they appear (Rockett 1987). Their apparent engagement with history and their efforts to understand the colonial past belie the fact that these films often decontextualise or misrepresent the anti‐colonial struggle. This holds true, regardless of the director’s own sympathies and whether the film employs the stereotypical melodramatic dichotomy of informer/villain versus rebel/hero or develops a more complex personal narrative. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that political resolution remained a distant prospect and the status quo in Ireland was apparently left intact with the rebel’s departure for America, films dealing with Irish history promulgated a popular message that celebrated and validated fugitive rebels as fighters in a just cause against oppression.

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Figure 2.1  ‘The first significant Irish historical story’: Rory O’More (1911).

The success of these films must also be seen in the context of cinema’s transitional phase to classical narrative film, a motivating factor behind the choice of subject‐matter for such films. The earliest cinema ‘genre’ can be said to be the chase film (Musser 1990, 1991), whether it is a group of people chasing a thief through an urban location; a posse following the gang in the western The Great Train Robbery (1903); or the rebel being pursued by the Redcoats in Rory O’More. What they all have in common is a linking chase sequence that unites the films’ various elements and brings the story to a climax. Notwithstanding the move away from early cinema’s exhibitionist or spectacle‐ based aesthetic in films made during the transitional phase to classical cinema, with the drive towards linear narrative, it was often the case that attention was drawn, by both the films themselves and reviewers, to the landscape in which the film’s action unfolded, thus shifting the emphasis from issues of historical authenticity to the film’s status as scenery. Indeed, the Kalem films make frequent ­references to the locations where the films were shot, such as the Lakes of Killarney, and in the adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s popular melodrama The Colleen Bawn (1911), the Colleen Bawn Rock. In Rory O’More, as Luke Gibbons (1987, p. 223) comments, such shots ‘only succeeded in throwing the action off course to the point of ruling out any possibility of developing a coherent, realist narrative’.



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By the mid‐1910s, as the seamless style of classical cinema began to assert itself, such ‘tourist gazes’ (Condon 2008) had largely disappeared from the cinema, in Ireland as elsewhere. However, another layer of narrative continuity is to be found in the displacement of the fictional rebel or real historical figure, such as the leader of the 1803 rebellion, Robert Emmet, in favour of a happy resolution through the uniting of the lovers. Shaking off some of the ideological constraints of the earlier films, Olcott and others made ever more radical nationalist films until the First World War ended their transatlantic visits to Ireland, yet the pull of classical cinema became more pronounced than the commitment to the Irish cause. Olcott’s version of the story of Robert Emmet, who was executed by the English after his failed 1803 rebellion, Bold Emmet, Ireland’s Martyr (1915), shifts the focus away from Emmet to the relationship between Con, a United Irishman, and his sweetheart Norah, who are reunited following a D.W. Griffith‐type last‐minute rescue scene. The same problem with finding a happy narrative resolution for dead revolutionaries helps explain the difficulties encountered by later filmmakers in telling the story of the most charismatic of the War of Independence leaders, Michael Collins, who died in a civil war ambush in 1922.2 In short, for many of these historical films the actual historical content is of secondary importance, though, clearly, an Irish audience would have read both the historical resonances and the named locations in more local or parochial terms. For the general mass of cinemagoers, for whom such films were made, interest in local colour was perhaps of less concern than the chase or action sequences, though all could celebrate the re‐uniting of the estranged or separated lovers, the standard resolution of much of classical narrative cinema. As a result, the cinema was already being de‐nationalised by the 1910s as producers sought to broaden the base of American cinema patrons beyond the ethnic ghetto. This issue would become a major impediment to the international distribution of Irish films as indigenous Irish filmmakers began to emerge from 1916 onwards.

Filmmaking During 1916–1920 If rebel narratives celebrating Ireland’s anti‐colonial struggle were popular with producers and audiences alike in the years before the First World War, the 1916 Rising put an abrupt halt to such films, with Irish history from then on having a powerful impact on contemporary politics. This was seen in a most public way in the controversy surrounding the release in Ireland in 1917 of Ireland, a Nation (1914). Made during the summer of 1914 in both Britain and Ireland by Irish‐born Walter MacNamara, who is best known for his role in the first sexploitation film, Traffic in Souls (USA, 1913), Ireland, a Nation is an often factually inaccurate survey of Irish history from the 1798 Rising to the Great Famine of the late 1840s.

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While the first copy of the film bound for Ireland went down with the Lusitania in May 1915, by the time a second copy found its way to Ireland in autumn 1916, the Easter Rising had occurred and the popular attitude to the event had been indelibly marked by the subsequent drawn‐out execution of its leaders, and, indeed, the ­continuation of state executions with the hanging of Roger Casement that August. As a result, when the military censors examined the film, they demanded a number of cuts to the more incendiary scenes, including the historically correct mock ­execution of one of the 1803 rebels, Anne Devlin. Despite the censors’ cuts, when the film was screened in Dublin in January 1917 audiences responded to the film in a manner unimaginable a year earlier: they sang rebel songs during it and cheered the killing of English soldiers. On the second day, the censors banned the film, but not before an important marker had been established about the role of historical film in the post‐Rising environment (Rockett 1987, pp. 12–16). By then, the most important Irish film production company of the silent era, the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI), had been registered. The FCOI was backed by a somewhat controversial Irish‐American lawyer, James Mark Sullivan, whose wife and FCOI director was a member of a wealthy Limerick business family, and the sister of a nationalist Member of Parliament, James O’Mara. Even though the FCOI’s first efforts went up in flames as its offices were located close to Dublin’s General Post Office, the headquarters of the Rising, the company renewed its filmmaking activities that summer and by the autumn had produced nine short comedies and dramas. Following the success of these releases, the company grew in ambition and set out to make the first indigenous Irish feature film, influenced, perhaps, by the screening in Dublin in September 1916 of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. If the FCOI was to escape the censor’s strictures, however, it knew that when tackling historical subjects, it would have to eschew the directness of the films of the previous five years. It was already evident that the Irish nationalist cause was not going to get sympathetic treatment from British cinema, and even though mainly American‐ made rebel films had been produced for a decade, British newsreels give a more telling account of how Irish nationalist aspirations would be treated on screen. Chambers (2012) shows how newsreels were an important propaganda weapon in promoting the anti‐republican unionist cause. Even before the outbreak of the First World War, newsreels were sympathetically representing unionist opposition to Home Rule, especially through the unionist strategy of creating Edward Carson as an iconic figure during 1912–1914. By contrast, not only did images of the Easter Rising barely feature in cinema programmes but footage of the War of Independence (1919–1921) was usually restricted to uncontextualised smokey scenes showing the aftermath of devastation and suggesting a people wedded to  violence, a trope later recycled within British feature films dealing with the ­partition of Ireland (Hill 1987, 2006). Even if the destruction had been the result of British actions, the context was displaced. ‘Ireland’s agony’ was caused by a ‘mystery fire’, a newsreel’s intertitle



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tells us following the burning of Cork city by British forces in December 1920. With the effective imposition of partition, Northern Ireland was presented as exclusively unionist with no nationalist perspective offered, even at election time. Unsurprisingly, the newsreels supported the 1921 Anglo‐Irish Treaty and demonised the ‘irreconcilable’ Eamon de Valera and others opposed to its ­provisions. While the locally‐produced Irish Events newsreel, 1917–1920, covered political and other events not featured in the dominant British newsreels, the authorities were sufficiently alert to the possibility of strong nationalist responses to such material that in 1919 they banned Sinn Fein Review, a compilation of Irish Events items. As a result, the Film Company of Ireland found itself in an unsympathetic ­environment that required it to eschew contemporary events, as well as the insurrectionary past. Nevertheless, it proved adept at raising issues that were central to the struggle for independence. Indeed, it could be said that its two feature films: an eight‐reel adaptation of Charles Kickham’s agrarian novel, Knocknagow (1873), perhaps the most popular of nineteenth‐century Irish novels, released in 1918, and its 1920 version of William Carleton’s anti‐sectarian novel Willy Reilly and his Dear Colleen Bawn: A Tale Founded on Fact (1855), subtly sought to align all social classes to the Irish cause, on the one hand, and to promote reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant, on the other.3 A land‐based drama with the ambition of a Dickens, Knocknagow had the kind of epic sweep that made it a suitable choice as Ireland’s first major film. Set in 1848 at the height of the Famine, it features an eviction scene, which, for the film’s first audiences, would have triggered memories of the Land War of 1879–1881, and the evictions of the Famine years in the 1840s. The film focuses attention on marginal land‐dwellers vulnerable to the actions of the callous land agent Pender, who is seeking to clear the land of tenants to make way for more profitable cattle grazing. Pender’s nemesis, Mat ‘the Thrasher’ Donovan (Brian Magowan), who owns a small patch of land in freehold, provides the film’s rallying cry, with the assertion that the Irish are ‘a clean‐hearted race [which] must eventually come into its own, no matter how long the journey, no matter how hard the road’. It is not hard to imagine how this call to national pride and unity would have affected Irish nationalist audiences on the eve of the War of Independence. In a subtle realignment of the novel, the film promotes cross‐class unity in its displacement of oppressive social relations by barely criticising Pender’s landlord, the rather benign absentee Sir Garrett Butler (Charles Power), and elevating to a position of leadership the ‘strong’ tenant farmer Maurice Kearney (Dermot O’Dowd), whose treatment of his tenants is depicted negatively by Kickham. The release of Knocknagow on the second anniversary of the Easter Rising was hardly coincidental, while reviews declared that Knocknagow ‘should make a very strong appeal to all classes of playgoers’,4 a view shared by Ireland’s first film trade publication, Irish Limelight, which said that it ‘cannot fail to appeal to all classes and creeds’.5 Thus, Knocknagow’s displacement of social relations on the land away

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from inter‐class conflict accorded with contemporary nationalist politics. In Knocknagow, landlord, small and large tenant‐farmers, and labourers all stand united against the reprehensible agent. While distributed in the USA to some acclaim,6 a less sympathetic view was taken in Britain where it was criticised by film trade publication Bioscope for having a ‘vehemently Irish point of view’, having ‘more than a soupcon of underlying propaganda’ and being ‘dangerously tinged with political feeling’.7 After the 1916 Rising, Irish films would have to run the gauntlet of often hostile British reviewers, especially if they even hinted at Irish political separateness, a policy that would find its way into the BBFC’s offices in the 1920s and 1930s (Rockett 2004). Bioscope, though, also identified one of the film’s weaknesses by recommending the attention of an expert editor to make it more comprehensible and perhaps more fast‐paced. By the standards of the already established classical American cinema, Knocknagow can be said to be slow and ponderous (as is the novel) and was unlikely to attract the patronage of those who did not have a cultural stake in the film’s content. While some might draw attention to the slower editing speed of European cinema during the silent period and emphasise its ‘theatricality’ (Brewster and Jacobs 1997), the fact remains that Irish and other audiences were already exposed to the rapid rhythmic patterns of American cinema, something against which European cinema generally would be measured, most often negatively, into the future. Nevertheless, the FCOI’s filmmaking style perhaps can be seen within a framework articulated by Higson (1995, 1998) in relation to British cinema that can be regarded as continuing a cultural movement eschewing ­modernism, or even Griffith‐style editing economy (Gunning 1994), and having its own coherent logic of long takes, slow pacing, literary influence, ‘pictorialism’ and ‘intermediality’ as with the relationship between Irish theatre and filmmaking practice in the 1910s, a topic in need of further exploration.

Anti‐sectarianism as Political Reconciliation and Unity The land question was given a new inflection in the FCOI’s second major feature, Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn (1920). The choice of subject and director, John MacDonagh, also signalled an even closer affinity between the FCOI and the struggle for independence. By the time of the production of Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn in 1919, the war was intensifying and many FCOI personnel were overtly sympathetic to or involved in the nationalist movement, most particularly director John MacDonagh, who had fought in the Rising under the command of his brother, Thomas, who was executed afterwards. From 1918, the FCOI, and John MacDonagh in particular, became more closely identified with the Irish Theatre Company, a breakaway group from the Abbey Theatre, which had a much more radical nationalist programme than the Abbey. The film was shot at



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St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, to further emphasise the film’s nationalist reference points. This school had been founded by Patrick Pearse, another leader of the Easter Rising executed in 1916, and Thomas MacDonagh, and with its stress on Irish language, culture, and history, it was an important symbol for Irish n ­ ationalists, and is now a state museum.8 Whereas Knocknagow had displaced tensions between landlords, tenant‐farmers, and other classes, Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn sought to reconcile Protestant and Catholic landowners, and, in this way, conveyed a broad anti‐sectarian message as a palliative to centuries of religious hostility in Ireland. Carleton’s 450‐page novel weaves the story of the wealthy young Catholic man, Willy Reilly, and the young Protestant woman, Helen, against a background of contemporary events: between the mid‐1740s, when the bigoted anti‐Catholic Lord Chesterfield was Governor‐General of Ireland, and the 1750s, when the anti‐Catholic penal laws became increasingly ignored or liberalised. As the relationship between Helen and Willy develops, the narrative accordingly revolves around three main issues: (1) the Squire’s efforts to convince Willy to change religion in order to marry Helen; (2) the response to Willy by another of Helen’s suitors, Whitecraft, a bigoted Protestant with a reprobate sexuality, who covets Willy’s property; and (3) the support Willy receives from sympathetic Protestants. Carleton’s narrative ends with Willy, Helen, and their children settled on the Continent, but for MacDonagh the story ends in Ireland with an image of religious and familial harmony, which includes Helen’s father. While the film can be said to be naïve in its resolution of the sectarian divide through young love, nevertheless, the choice of Carleton’s novel – set as it is in the mid‐eighteenth century, when not even the Protestant Ascendancy was synonymous with unionism  –  indicates a desire to find common pre‐Union (that is, pre‐1801) ground between the religions. Nevertheless, that difference was unlikely to be overcome by kindly Protestant gentlemen allowing their daughters to associate with gentlemen Catholics. The utopianism of the film of Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn, which shows the bigoted Protestant, Whitecraft, being charged after the intervention of his fellow Protestants, was further underscored by a line of dialogue (absent from the book) given to the Protestant clergyman, Rev. Brown: ‘Rising above every consideration is the fact that we are fellow Irishmen.’ The film’s premiere on the fourth anniversary of the Easter Rising leaves no doubt as to the particularity of these contemporary resonances. Stylistically, Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn has a smooth narrative flow that is absent from Knocknagow, though its reference point is European, perhaps Scandinavian, cinema of the time, rather than American classical cinema. Its relative sophistication led to its distribution in America, Britain, and even Spain.9 Unfortunately for Irish cinema, Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn was to be the FCOI’s swansong. Given the d­ eteriorating military situation, it is surprising that Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn was made at all. While these two feature films display a relatively moderate nationalist perspective on Ireland’s past, another FCOI film, When Love Came to Gavin Burke (1917),

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offers an insight into the underlying conservative moral code of the movement, something which would underpin the ideology of the new state. Although unique among Irish films of the period in its exploration of the nature of the family, When Love Came to Gavin Burke was clearly intended to reinforce traditional notions of morality and frugality, while also offering a temperance message. Punishment awaits the woman who chooses pleasure over poverty and happiness, a theme not uncommon in American and British films of the period. The film’s moral conservatism is further underlined by the contrast between the hard‐working, small farmer, Gavin, and the alcoholic hotelier, and, by extension, townsman and businessman, whom Kate marries for money not love, and lives to regret it. Such an unfavourable opposition of the rural and the urban was to become a feature of the ideology of the new state. But, the new Irish state chose to a large extent to ignore cinema except in the important sense of collecting significant amounts of entertainments tax on cinema tickets and maintaining an infantilising view of the Irish people since age classification of films was not allowed until 1965. As a result, about 2500 films were banned and another 10 000– 12 000 were cut during the first four decades of the independent state, figures that can be compared to the 500 films banned in Britain between 1913 and the 1970s (Robertson 1989, p. 2; Rockett 2004; Rockett and Rockett 2011b). The biggest problem faced by the Film Company of Ireland and its less ambitious contemporaries and successors, though, was one that has always confronted Irish film production companies: the reality of the global film economy. Not only was the newly‐independent Irish Free State an economically marginal country whose main exports were agricultural products, the island as a whole had low gross box‐office revenue relative to its size. In the 1930s, from when the first r­ eliable figures are available, the island of Ireland’s annual box‐office income was estimated at only £1.5 million, of which £895 000 was taken in the independent Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland), equivalent to 2.1% of Britain’s total of £41 120 000, or the Free State’s annual ticket sales of 18.25 million can be contrasted with Britain’s 963 million (Beere 1935–36; Rowson 1936). If British cinema struggled in the face of American dominance (or, the better parallel to Ireland, the even less visible Scottish cinema of the silent era), then Irish cinema’s marginal status was only a more extreme version of England’s difficulties. For both Scotland and Ireland, it was more a matter of what agency its independent exhibitors could muster, and the issue of what its audiences took from the imported cinema; indeed, whether it could be said that there was such an entity at all as a national cinema audience. While most of the cinemas in the Free State were owned by small‐ to medium‐ sized Irish exhibition companies until the mid‐1940s, when the British duopoly of Rank and ABC took over the main first‐run cinemas, the American majors maintained centralised distribution in London and treated Ireland as just another regional centre of the British (and Irish) Isles. Of course, almost all the distributors’ take went to American (and to a lesser extent) British film companies, where it further strengthened their respective film industries (Rockett and Rockett 2011b). As a result, Irish filmmakers have always faced the dilemma of whether to make



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modest and small‐scale indigenous productions suited in the first instance to Irish culture and society, or larger budget films more attuned to American and British audiences in the hope of recouping the cost from sales overseas. The FCOI chose the former option by anchoring its films in an explicitly Irish milieu and within Irish literary and theatrical traditions, a decision that sheds an interesting light on the most important political films of subsequent decades, such as Irish Destiny (George Dewhurst, 1926) and The Dawn (Tom Cooper, 1936), as well as those of the first wave of Irish cinema between 1975 and 1987. Even so, the FCOI’s films already seemed formally ‘old‐fashioned’ when compared with the production values, and performance and editing styles, of classical narrative cinema, which was establishing itself during the time period of the company’s existence. Yet, the argument articulated by Christine Gledhill (2011) in relation to 1920s’ British cinema can be applied to a degree to Ireland insofar as her assertion of the national specificity of British cinema with its own cultural traditions ought not to  be seen as what we term ‘old‐fashioned’ for the late 1910s’ FCOI films, but as  expressing a continuity of nineteenth‐century representational strategies. Nevertheless, in the Irish case, irony and critical distancing to colonialism have also been identified as important traits in the work of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault and other writers (Gibbons 1987; 1996; Butler‐Cullingford 2001), thus subverting a simplistic notion of national culture in the imperialist era. Whatever their political significance, the Film Company of Ireland’s films failed to create a basis for continuity of production, let alone a film industry. As became clear in the early sound era, genre cinema rather than national or even parochial concerns were in the ascendant internationally, where American cinema, then as now, dominated English‐language filmmaking. Yet, cinema of the silent and early sound era had an often deep and perhaps unexpected impact on writers, in Ireland as elsewhere, and not just for writers such as James Joyce who drew on cinema’s formal processes to articulate a modernist sensibility. Liam O’Flaherty and Elizabeth Bowen are two very different novelists whose work is imbricated with cinematic experiences.

Remembering the Revolution If the most engaging Irish‐themed films of the 1910s were inextricably linked with the Irish struggle for self‐determination, then the same can be said of the post‐ independence period when the most interesting films of the 1920s and 1930s were concerned with looking back to the events of 1916–1922. While only one such indigenous feature film, Irish Destiny, was made in the 1920s, by the 1930s not only Irish, but British and American filmmakers, saw the dramatic potential of setting their films in the revolutionary period. Nevertheless, the financial environment for private or state investment in an indigenous Irish cinema was almost non‐existent (for those who take for granted

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in studies of national cinemas that by the 1920s film studios, processing labs, apprenticeship training, entrepreneurial producers, and so on, were universal, no such film infrastructure or training opportunities existed in Ireland until many decades later), while the social conservatism of the new state discouraged any celebration of the insurrectionary past. By the 1920s, the nature of film production had also changed such that the high quality American classical narrative feature film had become so dominant that to compete with it would require substantial investment, something unavailable in Ireland. When it came to the sound era at the end of the decade, unlike in other European countries where a distinctive national language existed to protect the local film industry from further American encroachment, such was not available in Ireland as a means of helping regenerate film production. Thus, any Irish film made for the cinema had to accept the film industrial conditions under which such works would be produced and released. In that regard it was not just the lack of capital and expertise in Ireland that was going to restrict what might be produced for the screen, but the narrative form itself. In that regard, the cycle of War of Independence dramas in the 1920s and 1930s favoured action sequences over historical reflection, though some gave a particular republican thrust to their films. While British film censors took a hostile view of any depiction of the War of Independence, banning, for example, Irish Destiny until the military events were removed and the focus shifted to the distressed mother of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer (Figure 2.2). This led to the film being re‐titled An Irish Mother, a change that allowed the film to be certified

Figure 2.2  The ‘distressed mother’: Irish Destiny (1926).



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for circulation throughout the empire, and meant that a very different version of the film to the celebratory original was distributed in the colonies: Ireland’s detachment from the Empire was not allowed to be seen on the screen by subjugated people in Asia or Africa. Irish Destiny is revealing of another challenge facing marginal filmmakers in the 1920s. While the film has an innovative mix of dramatised sequences of an IRA man’s military activity and his subsequent capture, imprisonment, and escape combined with actuality footage of the war, including the burning of Cork city by British forces, there is a sub‐plot concerning poteen distilling in an old mill (another anti‐drink message) that provides more than a passing nod to the dominant German cinema of the mid‐1920s. In the mill scenes, shot in a London studio as no such Irish facility existed, the design, chiaroscuro lighting, performance style, and physical characteristics of the gang are copied from contemporary German Expressionist cinema. Thus, Irish Destiny looks to American cinema in its action sequences and to European cinema in its homage to German art cinema, while at the same time providing a distinctive mix of drama and newsreel that contained, if nothing else, a reminder than the ‘real’ was indeed very real in Ireland’s recent past. While British film censors, some of whom had served in Ireland during the Anglo‐Irish war, took a stern view of any celebration of Ireland’s detachment from the empire, they also sought to dissuade American and British producers from making films about the period. Thus, films such as John Ford’s 1935 adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer and Ford’s version of Sean O’Casey’s 1916 play The Plough and the Stars (1936), while adding little to an appreciation of the period from an Irish perspective, agitated British censors. The Informer had at least four minutes cut by British censors, though it might not have been released in Ireland at all except that the appeal board overturned censor James Montgomery’s total ban on the film, a reminder that post‐independence realist writers were subject to both literary and cinematic censorship in their homeland (Rockett 2004). It was, though, the Irish‐made The Dawn that had the greatest impact both at the box office and in supportive critical comment. While not having the polish of a Hollywood production, nevertheless, this Killarney‐produced film outperformed other such films at the Irish box office and was favourably contrasted with another independence story, Ourselves Alone (1936), made by Northern Irish director Brian Desmond Hurst (Hill 2000). The ‘authenticity’ of The Dawn’s story, location, and personnel (some of the cast and crew had fought on the Republican side in the War of Independence in Kerry) was contrasted with the artificiality and stiffness of the British‐produced Ourselves Alone with its uncritical and uncontextualised ‘love across the divide’ storyline in which the sister of an IRA leader falls in love with her brother’s killer, a British officer. Will this be the ‘lie agreed on’? asked the hostile Irish Press,10 but it was an early outing for a narrative trope that would feature prominently in post‐1969 Northern Ireland stories for the cinema and television.

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While a silent version of Frank O’Connor’s 1931 tragic‐humanist story of the befriending, and execution, of two British hostages by IRA men, ‘Guests of the Nation’, was adapted for the screen by playwright Denis Johnston in 1933–1934, it was The Dawn that was to prove the more successful. In The Dawn, when it is revealed after he is shot dead that the masquerade of the English‐accented character was a ruse to protect a highly‐placed IRA man, the wrongful stain of informant going back to Fenian times of the 1860s is lifted from the family. However, the subsequent statement by the dead IRA man’s father, that ‘the fight must go on’, carried an explicit message less aimed at the Black and Tans than against the continuation of partition and the issue of the unfinished Irish revolution (Rockett 1987). While such dialogue is unusual in Irish cinema, The Dawn was in a way a swansong for that generation of Irish filmmakers. Even though the Irish Film Society, formed in the year of The Dawn’s release, valiantly sought to engage the government in promoting indigenous film culture, its art cinema, modernist and critical social agenda, which included in its sights the failed legacy of the revolution and the post‐ colonial state, was out of tune with the backward‐looking conservative moral and cultural forces which held sway in Ireland in the post‐independence decades. As a result, the Irish state sought to attract foreign film investors who might contribute to economic rather than cultural activity, and to that end, as the studio era was waning, Ireland’s first film studio was opened in 1958 with government aid (Rockett 1987). It was a convenient way of keeping from cinema screens an exploration by indigenous filmmakers of the uncomfortable realities of the post‐independence decades. Thus, notwithstanding the cultural nationalist underpinnings of the independent Irish state, for most of the revolutionary generation who took power after 1922, cinema was rarely seen as having the potential to engage with, or make a contribution to, Irish cultural expression.

Notes 1 The Lad from Old Ireland and other Kalem/Olcott films may be streamed or downloaded at Irish Film & TV Research Online (http://www.tcd.ie/Irishfilm). 2 In the case of a barely‐disguised film about Michael Collins, the 1936 film Beloved Enemy (dir. H.C. Potter), the producers made two versions of the film. In one, Collins dies in the conventional way; in the other, he appears to live on to continue his relationship with Lady Helen, a character based on Lady Lavery. 3 A special issue (no. 33, 2012) of the online journal Screening the Past (www. screeningthepast.com) is devoted to the Film Company of Ireland, and specifically to Knocknagow, including a more extended discussion by this writer of the FCOI’s films. 4 Dublin Evening Mail, 20 April 1918, p. 4. 5 Irish Limelight, February 1918, p. 8. 6 Evening Telegraph, 13 December 1919, p. 4. 7 Bioscope, 16 October 1919, p.58.



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8 During the filming of Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn, John MacDonagh openly ­displayed sympathy for the nationalist movement by making a short film for the Republican Loan Bonds campaign which featured Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and other prominent nationalist leaders. In Ireland, the film was exhibited in an ­unorthodox fashion: IRA volunteers entered cinema projection rooms and ordered projectionists at gunpoint to replace the film being shown with the Republican Loan film. By the time the authorities were alerted, the volunteers and their film had disappeared. ( John MacDonagh’s unpublished memoirs, Liam O’Leary collection, National Library of Ireland.) 9 Irish Limelight, quoted in Liam O’Leary collection programme note, National Library of Ireland. 10 Irish Press, 14 July 1936, p. 5.

References Allen, Robert C. and Gomery, Douglas (1985). Film History: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Barnes, John (1976). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Barnes, John (1983). The Rise of Cinema in Great Britain. London: Bishopsgate Press. Barnes, John (1988). Pioneers of the British Film. London: Bishopsgate Press. Beere, Thekla (1935–36). Cinema statistics in Saorstát Éireann. Journal of the Statistical and Social Enquiry Society of Ireland 89th session: 83–110. Brewster, Ben and Jacobs, Lea (1997). Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler‐Cullingford, Elizabeth (2001). Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Cork: Cork University Press. Caughie, John. (2015). Plenary address, ‘What is Cinema History?’ conference, University of Glasgow, June 2015 (unpublished). Chambers, Ciara (2012). Ireland in the Newsreels. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Condon, Denis (2008). Early Irish Cinema, 1895–1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Gibbons, Luke (1987). Romanticism, realism and Irish cinema. In: Cinema and Ireland (Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill), 194–257. London: Croom Helm. Gibbons, Luke (1996). Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork University Press. Gledhill, Christine (2011). Remembering the war in 1920s British cinema. In: British Silent Cinema and the Great War (ed. Michael Hammond and Michael Williams), 94–108. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gunning, Tom (1990). The cinema of attractions. In: Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker), 56–62. London: BFI Publishing. Gunning, Tom (1994). D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Years at Biograph. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gunning, Tom (2005). Modernity and early cinema. In: Encyclopaedia of Early Cinema (ed. Richard Abel), 439–442. London: Routledge. Hansen, Miriam (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Higson, Andrew (1995). The victorious recycling of national history: Nelson. In: Film and the First World War (ed. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp), 108–115. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Higson, Andrew (1998). Heritage discourses and British cinema before 1920. In: Celebrating 1895: Proceedings of the International Conference on Film before 1920 (ed. John Fullerton), 182–189. Eastleigh: John Libbey. Hiley, Nicholas (2002). Nothing more than a “craze”: cinema building in Britain from 1909–1914. In: Young and Innocent: The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930 (ed. Andrew Higson), 121–130. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Hill, John (1987). Images of violence. In: Cinema and Ireland (Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill), 147–193. London: Croom Helm. Hill, John (2000). “Purely Sinn Fein propaganda”: the banning of Ourselves Alone (1936). Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20 (3): 317–333. Hill, John (2006). Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London: British Film Institute. Kellner, Douglas (1995). Mass Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and Postmodern. London: Routledge. Low, Rachael and Manvell, Roger (1948). The History of the British Film, 1896–1906. London: George Allen & Unwin. McKernan, Luke (2007). Diverting time: London cinemas and their audiences, 1904–1914. The London Journal 2: 125–144. Musser, Charles (1990). The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Vol. 1, History of the American Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Musser, Charles (1991). Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Robertson, James C (1989). The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1972. London: Routledge. Rockett, Kevin (1987). History, politics and Irish cinema. In: Cinema and Ireland (Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill), 3–144. London: Croom Helm. Rockett, Kevin (2001). Representations of Irish history in fiction films made prior to the  1916 Rising. In: Rebellion and Remembrance in Modern Ireland (ed. Larry Geary), 214–228. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Rockett, Kevin (2004). “Something rich and strange”: James Joyce, Beatrice Cenci and the Volta. Film and Film Culture 4: 21–34. Rockett, Kevin and Rockett, Emer (2011a). Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Rockett, Kevin and Rockett, Emer (2011b). Film Exhibition and Distribution in Ireland, 1909–2010. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Rowson, Simon (1936). A statistical survey of the cinema industry in Great Britain in 1934. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 99: 67–129. Shannon, Christopher (2010). Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. Scranton, NJ: University of Scranton Press. Singer, Ben (1995). Modernity, hyperstimulus, and the rise of popular sensationalism. In: Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R Schwartz), 72–99. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Toulmin, Vanessa (2006). Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection. London: BFI Publishing.

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British Cinema in the 1930s Lawrence Napper

At the cost of being repetitious, I suggest that there is still unemployment, there is still ship‐building, and there is still farming. We have an industrial north that is bigger than Gracie Fields running around a Blackpool funfair. (C. A. Lejeune (1934), p. 18)

Introduction C.A. Lejeune’s exasperated remark is perhaps a good place to start, since it encapsulates an attitude that dominated critical thinking about 1930s British cinema for over half a century. Originally part of a review in her regular column for The Observer, the comment was quoted approvingly in 1949 by Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith in their influential survey of world cinema, The Film Till Now (Rotha and Griffith 1967, p. 549). That citation appears be the origin of the remark’s fame, for the review from which it was taken was not anthologised in Lejeune’s own 1947 collection of her work, Chestnuts in Her Lap, nor did it appear in the posthumous collection edited by her son in 1991. Nevertheless, by 1984, in his reappraisal of British cinema and society of the 1930s, The Age of the Dream Palace, Jeffrey Richards could describe the review as ‘famous’, citing its appearance in The Film Till Now and quoting it twice at length: once in the context of a discussion about Gracie Fields’ star persona and once in relation to the theme of ‘Putting Britain on the Screen’ (Richards 1984, pp. 188, 246). Andrew Higson also draws on it in his 1995 account of the construction of a national cinema, Waving the Flag, arguing that it  represents a response typical of ‘more up‐market reviewers’ to Fields’ film, Sing As We Go (Basil Dean, 1934), in its complaint that the industrial life of the A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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nation was offered on screen merely as the background to a comedy vehicle, rather than as an important and serious subject in its own right (Higson 1995, p. 173). Sing As We Go is undoubtedly the film to which Lejeune alludes in her remark. However, the column in which it appears is in fact reviewing a different film altogether – Gaumont‐British’s lavish costume drama, Jew Suss (Lothar Mendes, 1934). These two pithy sentences, then, evoke three distinct modes of British film ­production in the 1930s, and firmly establish a hierarchy between them. First, there are films such as Jew Suss – epic, expensive dramas, far removed in time and place from the ordinary lives of British audiences and designed in various ways to compete with Hollywood productions. Rotha and Griffith list the historical epics  made by Alexander Korda in this category, alongside most of the flagship productions of Gaumont‐British, including Jew Suss. They conclude that such productions failed to create ‘an English style’ and that most, including Jew Suss, had been forgotten by 1949. Lejeune’s original criticism is not in fact that Jew Suss is a bad film. She praises it as impressive: ‘well written, richly set, photographed ­handsomely but without fuss’. Nevertheless, having praised the way in which it was done, she says, ‘the question remains: Was it worth doing?’ Apparently not, for closer to home there were more important subjects, such as unemployment and shipbuilding to be tackled. The second category is of films that are indeed set closer to home. They are films like Sing As We Go – narratives about contemporary British life, often centring on working‐class characters played by working‐class stars. The comedies starring Gracie Fields and George Formby made at Associated Talking Pictures are the most famous of this category, although they are only the tip of an iceberg of films showcasing popular comedians in contemporary settings. Massively popular with audiences, such films were nevertheless unsatisfactory to critics who, like Lejeune, found their generic address offputtingly frivolous. In the face of the industrial and economic problems facing the nation, such critics argued, film had a more important function than just making the population laugh. The third category of films is the one that Lejeune champions, but laments is not actually made by commercial producers. At the end of her column she implores British filmmakers to devote ‘the same care and money they have so generously spent’ on Jew Suss to ‘a film of British industry, British agriculture, or for that matter British mining’. The critical orthodoxy she expresses here would became increasingly central to writing about British cinema through the 1930 and the 1940s, and would colour retrospective accounts of that cinema for decades to come. Charles Barr (1986, p. 5) argues that throughout the 1930s the ‘leading edge’ of British film criticism was to be found in a series of journals that were closely associated with the British documentary movement, and particularly with the figure of John Grierson. The kind of film that Lejeune envisages surely owes a debt to the Griersonian aesthetic  –  a serious cinema setting out in narrative terms the economic and social problems facing modern Britain in the same way



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that the documentary films of the Empire Marketing Board and later the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit were successfully doing in the non‐commercial sphere. Such a cinema would be concerned with realistic representations of ordinary Britons’ lives, detailing the link between the individual protagonist and the wider life of the community. Lejeune actually names some examples of films which she thinks come close to this ideal – Red Ensign (Michael Powell, 1934) and Song of the Plough ( John Baxter, 1933) – which dealt with ship building and agriculture respectively. However, she concludes that they ‘never had a chance’ to fulfil the promise of their conception, made as they were on extremely low budgets in the ‘quota’ section of the industry. A further production that promised to deal with the ‘epic story of unemployment’ had been planned as a feature, she noted, but eventually limped out as a ‘short’ (the film is not named, but is possibly Doss House [John Baxter, 1933]). The kind of fiction film that Lejeune wished for (and certainly the kind of film that Rotha and Griffith were alluding to when they quoted her in 1949) did not in fact emerge until the very end of the decade, and only really came into its own from 1942 onwards. Partly a response to wartime conditions, and partly the result of a shift in personnel from documentary to feature production, the cycle of wartime films ‘documenting’ ordinary citizens’ response to the crisis has long been celebrated as a ‘golden age’ of British cinema. This ‘wartime wedding’ of documentary aesthetics with restrained, realist narratives about ordinary people was exemplified by films such as The Bells Go Down (Basil Dearden, 1943) and Millions Like Us (Launder and Gilliat, 1943) and precisely answered the ambitions which critics had been expressing throughout the 1930s. John Ellis (1996, p. 67) offers an exhaustive anatomisation of the critical discourse that championed it, detailing the ways in which a variety of writers (including Lejeune) developed a ‘highly coherent set of aesthetic judgements’ through which they identified the British ‘quality film’ of the 1940s. Ellis emphasises the ‘quality film’ as distinct from the industry idea of the ‘prestige film’. The prestige film was defined ­primarily by budget, potential box‐office and exportability. The ‘quality film’, by contrast was a critical category  –  identified by tone, address, and aesthetics, rather than market position. Some of the critical terms used to define the ‘quality film’ – such as ‘truth’, ‘logic’, and ‘reality’ – seem rather oblique today and, as Ellis argues, ‘their true meaning is slipping away from us as we seek to reassess the films about which [the critics] made such confident judgements’. This reassessment gathered pace from the 1990s onwards, when film historians sought to revisit some of the films which fell outside the ‘quality’ criteria and which had been ruthlessly damned by the critics as a result. They emphasise both the popularity and the imaginative flair of non‐realist cycles such as Gainsborough’s melodramas, Powell and Pressburger’s fantasies and the ubiquitous genre ­comedies. Nevertheless, the landscape of judgement implied by the ‘quality film’ has proven remarkably tenacious.

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The Historical Perspective If the dominance of the ‘quality film’ had a distorting effect on initial assessments of British cinema of the 1940s, its effect on accounts looking back to the 1930s was even more dramatic. Looking back from the 1960s at his own contribution as head of Gaumont British during the 1930s, Michael Balcon (1969, p. 99) ruefully observed that: Now that events can be seen in their historical perspective, one cannot escape the conclusion that in our own work, we could have been more profitably engaged. Hardly a single film of the period reflects the agony of those times.

Balcon’s retrospective assessment is a striking demonstration of a shifting historical perspective. From the vantage point of 1969, a ‘profitable’ engagement in filmmaking had come to mean one which responded to the demands of realist critics – a cinema which engaged with the political and social crises of the 1930s in the way that the films of the 1940s engaged with the wartime crisis, reflecting the ‘agony of the times’. Looking back on the production cycles of the 1930s, Balcon was dismayed to find no such films to celebrate. He was not alone. Rotha and Griffith suggested that ‘genuine British production was dormant until the war’, citing only three films – The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed, 1939), Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940) and Love on the Dole ( John Baxter, 1941) as meriting mention. Even as late as 1978, Roy Armes (1978, p. 95) in his Critical History of British Cinema, ended a relatively detailed survey of the various genres and production cycles of the 1930s by quoting Balcon’s comment approvingly, and adding that despite the isolated achievements of individual directors such as Asquith and Hitchcock, British films remained essentially trivial because they failed to ‘mirror the observed facts of English life’. He turned to another realist critic, Dilys Powell, to deliver the coup de grâce, quoting her 1946 observation that the 1930s had failed to produce a ‘tradition’ of British films, and had failed to infuse the ‘national characteristics of the British’ into a ‘national cinema’. Against this abject failure can be contrasted the shining critical success of the British documentary movement. Given the close relationship between the movement and the writers for the key film journals of the period, it is perhaps not surprising to find their work offered as a template for the way that the nation should be represented onscreen. Forsyth Hardy, writing in 1947, considered documentary to be ‘the distinctively British’ cinema. Rotha and Griffith similarly deemed it ‘the most important, and almost the only, British contribution to world cinema until the war years’, driving home the contrast to fiction film making by claiming that ‘these films have had something to do with life in Britain as it is lived’, while British fiction features ‘seldom have anything to do with significant life as it is lived anywhere’. Perhaps the telling phrase here is ‘significant life’. It was central



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to Grierson’s much‐quoted conception of documentary films that they should reveal and celebrate the essential inter‐connectedness of modern society: We take the postmen for granted, like the milkmen, the engine driver, the coal miner, the lot of them … yet we are all dependent on them, just as we are all ­interdependent one to another … this is what we must get over. This is what ­documentary is all about. (quoted in Antony 2011, p. 14)

The films themselves, although surprisingly various in their aesthetic form and technique, and often experimental in their style, retain this common quality – they imbue the ordinary working man, and the industrial processes in which he is involved with a heroic national significance. It is hard, even today, to remain unmoved by the detailed delineation of the process of postal distribution in Night Mail (Harry Watt, 1936) or by the modernist celebration of manual labour in Coal Face (Cavalcanti, 1936). Nevertheless, in recent decades, the universal approbation quoted above has been tempered by a variety of more circumspect critiques. Jeffrey Richards has offered a useful summary of these critiques and debates (Richards 2011, pp. 2–3). Despite their celebration of the nobility of the working man (Figure 3.1), and the sympathy with left‐wing ideas evident in much of the filmmakers’ writings (particularly in their critiques of commercial filmmaking), it

Figure 3.1  Celebration of the nobility of the ‘ordinary working man’: Night Mail (1936).

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has been argued that the films themselves broadly support the status quo, rather than arguing for change or detailing the ways in which social improvements might be fought for or made. This is perhaps not surprising, since the unit was largely sponsored through government money, and the films themselves were distributed free of charge to schools, youth organisations, and film societies via the Empire Film Library. While some social ills are exposed (for instance, in Housing Problems [Anstey, 1935]), those problems are represented as already being resolved by the system, rather than as arising from that system. The possibility that the heroic workers might be in dispute with their employers or with the state is not entertained (Durgnat 1970; Aitken 1990). Other questions have been raised about the tendency of the filmmakers to concentrate on – and to fetishise – the working‐class male body, placing masculinity at the centre of their conception of ‘authentic life’ and more or less side‐ lining women altogether (Dodd and Dodd 1996). Perhaps the most convincing critique comes from Martin Stollery, who notes that while the post‐war reputation of the movement is based on its representations of the Nation (the most recent collection on the topic is actually called The Projection of Britain), in the 1930s, the Empire, and the civilising effect of imperial domination, were in fact the focus of much of its work. A key text here is The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934), winner of the ‘Prix du gouvernement’ at the 1935 International Film Festival in Brussels. Stollery’s analysis of the film places it within a tradition of representing colonised lands and peoples as simple and primitive, untouched by modernity until the ‘civilising’ influence of imperial rule. He notes the tendency to fetishise the bodies of the Ceylonese fishermen, associating them with a natural and unchanging world in a familiar Orientalist move. While it is possible to detect a hint of critique in the shift from a focus on the rituals and traditions to the modernity associated with the ‘voices of commerce’, this occurs at the expense of the peoples represented. Their viewpoint, the history of social or commercial exploitation as they experience it, is not the subject of the film. Stollery recounts Wright’s hostile review of Zoltan Korda’s epic imperial fantasy The Drum (Korda, 1938) which castigates that film for missing an opportunity to delineate the ‘political and social problems’ which the Empire represented, and yet this is an opportunity which is also missed by The Song of Ceylon. Indeed, for all their colourful racist fantasies, the popular imperial epics produced by Korda did at least acknowledge the possibility that mass native resistance might result in the fragmentation of the Empire, something which, as Stollery notes, ‘the 1930s British documentary films of Empire could never do’ (2000, p. 202). ‘Hardly a single film of the period reflects the agony of those times.’ From the perspective of today, Balcon’s assessment of the fiction film industry in the 1930s seems unnecessarily harsh. Over the last 25 years or so, the assumptions that dominated the writing of film history up to the late 1980s have been systematically challenged, and along with that challenge has come an important shift in the methodologies used by film historians. As a result, the dominance of the realist ideal



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that I have traced above has also begun to wane, and the British cinema of the 1930s has emerged as perhaps more engaging and more exciting than has hitherto been assumed. Drawing on James Chapman, Sue Harper, and Mark Glancy’s (2007, p. 2) account of ‘new film history’, it is possible to suggest two ways in which assumptions about the purpose of film history have shifted. First, as the 1930s have become more remote, there has developed a more precise understanding of the difference between history and criticism. The early writers on British film history had themselves been critics, or conceived of their role as ­similar to that of critics. They sought to identify the best in British production, establishing the aesthetic and political criteria by which that judgement might be made and identifying a canon of great works that they understood to be of lasting significance. Hence Rotha and Griffith’s damnation of Jew Suss simply through the observation that it had been ‘forgotten’. Film historians today are more likely to conceive of their role as one that interrogates the significance of particular films for particular audiences rather than against a universal aesthetic ideal. When Jeffrey Richards discusses Gracie Fields’ comedies in The Age of the Dream Palace, his concern is to understand what the films (and Fields’ role within them) meant to the popular audiences of the period, to discover who that audience was and what was the context within which they watched the films. Thus, rather than dismissing the films as ‘trivial’, he traces the particular ways in which the films projected Field’s northern star persona, emphasising the combined qualities of charisma and ‘­ordinariness’ which she exhibited and which enabled her to personify an ideal of ‘consensus’ politics  –  appealing across class boundaries through her big‐hearted comic antics. Richards’ book is a relatively early example of this new kind of film history and it remains one of the few books devoted exclusively to British cinema of the 1930s. He offers chapters analysing various stars and genres, but also interrogates some of the institutions of cinema in the period – the role of the Board of Film Censors, the relationships between cinema companies and government, the texture of the cinema‐going experience itself. In this concern not simply to analyse the films, but to widen the investigation to ask questions about how the films are  produced and distributed, regulated and appraised by different audiences, Richards set the standard for later histories. Broadly, The Age of the Dream Palace suggests that film producers and cinema‐goers had conservative social attitudes in the 1930s and that the films that were produced in the decade (tightly controlled by censorship) supported this contentment with the status quo. Other writers have supported this view of cinema as a thoroughly hegemonic phenomenon, turning to popular genres such as the Gracie Fields comedies for evidence (Figure 3.2). The consensus politics identified by Richards has also been emphasised by writers such as Armes (1978), Stead (1989), Aldgate (1983), and Shafer (1997), noting that the good‐hearted chaos of Fields’ antics, whether they be played out by a newly unemployed Gracie in a Blackpool funfair (Sing As We Go), or as part of a campaign to stop a big department store closing down a local indoor market (Look Up and Laugh [Basil Dean, 1935]), never really threaten the status quo, and are always

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Figure 3.2  Regional comedy: Gracie Fields in Sing As We Go (1934).

ultimately resolved with an affirmation of the basic rightness of the existing social structure. Such accounts use notions of consensus, containment. and reassurance, and emphasise cinema as an instrument for social control as much as one for ­entertainment. They perhaps tend to flatten out the possible variety of pleasurable responses audiences may have had to such films. More recent accounts have stressed the rather more contingent nature of British society in the 1930s, understanding it to be in the throes of an important series of transitions both socially and economically, and reading the films’ emphasis on play, disguise, trespass, ­disruption, and dissent as indicative of this social experience (Higson 1995; Napper 2009, 2012). The second way in which film history has shifted in recent years relates back to Balcon’s disappointment at the failure of his films to ‘reflect the agony of the times’. The metaphor of cinema as a mirror, reflecting the life of the nation that produced it, is one much beloved of earlier film historians. Above I have rather laboured the point that this straightforward model has been detrimental to the reputation of British cinema of the 1930s, particularly in the light of critics’ preference for realism as a mode of representation. New film histories of the 1930s downplay the notion that the world represented onscreen should somehow mirror the lived experience of the audience, preferring to emphasise the British cinema of the decade as one primarily made up of genre films. Instead of ‘reflection’, they offer



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more active metaphors for the relationship between audiences and the images onscreen. Glancy (2013) suggests ‘mediation’, while other writers might suggest that social experiences are ‘processed’ through a more oblique series of generic, visual, and narrative codes. For example, Sarah Street (2005, p. 20) has discussed the Gaumont‐British cycle of prestige musicals showcasing Jessie Matthews in terms of their design aesthetic. In films such as Evergreen (Victor Saville, 1934) and It’s Love Again (Saville, 1935), Matthews plays a struggling chorine forced to adopt a series of fake personas in order to gain access to the glamorous nightclubs, society parties, and luxurious apartments populated by those who might recognise her talent and make her a star. At first glance the exclusive Art Deco spaces depicted onscreen (designed by Alfred Junge) bear little relationship to the lived reality of ordinary cinemagoers. Yet, as Street points out, by the mid‐1930s the Art Deco style with its emphasis on modernity and use of cheap new materials, had become a remarkably accessible commodity. Even if cinemagoers couldn’t afford to emulate it in their own homes, they were familiar with it through its extensive use in popular commercial spaces, not least cinema buildings themselves. The super‐­ cinemas, built during the building boom of 1932–1937 for chains such as ABC and Odeon, drew heavily on the style. Incorporating cafés and other facilities, they offered cinemagoers an evening of glamorous entertainment for just the price of a cinema ticket – a chance to move through spaces of opulence and opportunity, even temporarily, much as Matthews does in the films themselves. Earlier accounts baulked at the apparently irrelevant frivolity of the Matthews films, their seemingly reactionary support for a society rigidly organised around class difference, and the apparent distance between the over‐elocuted creatures onscreen and the ordinary British cinemagoer. Street, by contrast, draws on a tradition that reads the films more metaphorically, combining textual evidence with extra‐textual readings of Matthews’ star persona (her rise from working‐class origins to the West End stage) and the context in which her films were seen, to support a reading which emphasises the films’ depiction of class mobility, sexual and social transgression and shifting identity (see also Bergfelder 1997; Macnab 2000). Like the design style that dominates them, the films gesture towards a fantasy of democratic modernity. The cycle of Matthews musicals was part of a concerted strategy by Gaumont‐ British to break into the American market. The same might be said of other prestige productions such as Jew Suss and the historical epics produced by Alexander Korda. Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) led the way in this respect (Figure 3.3). Distributed by United Artists, it became such a spectacular box‐office success in the US that other producers were inspired with the dream of creating internationally successful British films. These attempts to break into the US market (much larger and thus more lucrative than the domestic British market) should be understood in the context of the dominance of Hollywood films in the British exhibition scene. The vast majority of films seen by British cinema‐goers were American productions, and there is evidence to suggest that British audiences

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Figure 3.3  A ‘prestige production’ aimed at the US market: The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933).

generally preferred them (Richards and Sheridan 1987; Sedgwick 2001; Harper 2004). This imbalance caused much debate and consternation in industry and government circles from the early 1920s onwards and the ‘problem’ of the American dominance of British screens was debated at the highest levels. The  threat was understood to be both economic and cultural. American dominance of British screens threatened to educate audiences in ‘ways of thinking and acting and speaking that were not British’, but also appeared to showcase American manufacturing products to the detriment of British ones, not only at home but also across the Empire (Dickinson and Street 1985, p. 16; Napper 2009, pp. 17–34). With the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, concern extended to the ways in which American speech patterns might pollute the mouths of British audiences. Punch frequently made fun of the apparent discrepancy between US films and British culture, as in their cartoon of 1936 showing two elderly English ladies watching a gangster film. ‘You see what they’re doing, Emily?’ one lady diligently explains to her companion, ‘Taking him for a ride. Presently we shall see them sock him and possibly bump him off’ (Anon 1936, p. 583). Despite such jokes, the survival of the British industry was a matter of serious concern for producers and for politicians in the late 1920s. British films, it was argued, were worth protecting because they offered a bulwark against this



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American cultural domination by showcasing British cultural values at home and abroad. In 1928, a measure of protection was introduced in the Cinematograph Films Act, which demanded that all distributors offer, and exhibitors show, a certain percentage of British‐made films alongside their Hollywood attractions. This ‘quota’ rose each year throughout the 10 years of the Act. The Act stimulated financial investment in the industry, enabling the establishment of several apparently stable integrated film companies with international ambitions, such as the Gaumont‐British Picture Corporation, British International Pictures Ltd., and Korda’s London Films. It also encouraged a large number of very small producers making very cheap films for use by American distributors keen to discharge their quota responsibilities with as little investment as possible. Recent histories have challenged the popular conception that the cheap ‘quota quickie’ films which resulted from this legislation were universally unwatchable and brought the British industry as a whole into disrepute (Napper 1997; Chibnall 2007). Many ‘quota quickies’ are fascinating cultural objects in their own right and they were often surprisingly successful at the box office. Not attempting to compete financially with Hollywood productions, they showcase unexpected aspects of British cultural and theatrical life, often in quite excessive, bizarre, and satisfying ways (Richards 1998). The films championed by Lejeune above  –  Song of the Plough and Red Ensign – are, after all, ‘quota quickies’. Quota films are an extreme case, but all British filmmaking in the 1930s had to respond at some level to the presence and model of American film as the dominant cinema‐going experience. Broadly speaking, producers either chose to make films which were distinct from Hollywood models, showcasing local stars and traditions in films directed solely to British audiences and not intended for export, or they chose to compete with Hollywood films, making films as lavish and ambitious as their Hollywood competitors – films which, like the Jessie Matthews cycle, were often also attempts to break into the American market. Andrew Higson (1995) offers an exhaustive account of these differing strategies of ‘product differentiation’ and ‘economic competition’ in Waving the Flag, offering case‐studies of Sing As We Go and Evergreen as respective exemplars. Much of Higson’s interest in this work is in the question of national cinema itself – is it possible, he asks, to talk about a British filmmaking style in this period and, if so, what might that style look like? Higson’s detailed textual analysis of the two films contrasts the smoother narrative construction and more classical editing of Evergreen against the centrality of performance, and the emphasis on a montage of discrete attractions in Sing As We Go. However, the 1930s are not his focus. His study extends the question of national filmmaking style beyond the 1930s, concluding with a chapter on two celebrated films of the 1940s (Millions Like Us [Launder and Gilliat, 1943] and This Happy Breed [David Lean, 1944]) where a mixture of these two modes, combined with a documentary address, is offered as the final resting place for the ‘construction of a national cinema’. Again, we are pulled back to the Second World War as the locus of the British ‘tradition’ which Dilys Powell and others had damningly failed to find in the 1930s.

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Alfred Hitchcock offers another opportunity for thinking about the relationship between British and American cinema in this period, not least because his work in Britain during the decade culminates in his departure to America to make Rebecca (1940) and then a string of justly celebrated American classics. Early auteurist studies of Hitchcock tended to downplay or ignore his British work altogether (Wood 1989). Indeed, Manchester University Press’s excellent book series on ‘British Film‐Makers’ notwithstanding, the relationship between auteur theory and British cinema more generally has been a fraught one ever since the first issue of Movie declared the two fields antipathetic (it is telling that Manchester University Press’s equivalent for France is simply called ‘French Film Directors’). Serious academic interest in British cinema only got going after the high‐watermark of auteur theory had passed – perhaps because only then did such work seem possible. Hitchcock – possibly the most famous auteur of all time – only really ‘became Hitchcock’ once he was in America and, as Charles Barr points out, critics have looked to ‘anywhere but England’ in attempting to trace the influences which led to his special genius. American cinema, Soviet cinema, and German cinema are frequently cited as his key influences, and Hitchcock himself was keen to downplay the importance of the British filmmakers and scriptwriters he encountered as colleagues in the first 20 years of his career. Nevertheless, there have been two significant studies of Hitchcock’s British output, both of which have been concerned to demonstrate the totality of Hitchcock’s immersion in the cultural life of 1930s Britain. Tom Ryall (1986) places Hitchcock firmly within the national cinematic culture of the period, outlining both the commercial pressures on filmmakers of the period and the more intellectual influences of movements such as the Film Society, of which Hitchcock (and many other commercial directors) was a member. For Ryall, it is the ‘golden sextet’ of 1930s thrillers – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) which offer the most perfect blending of classical genre filmmaking in the Hollywood mode, with a more intellectual and experimental style. Ryall suggests that Hitchcock pushes at the limits of this style of cinema, looking forward to the mixture of formal experiment and classical style that would mark his Hollywood work. Charles Barr (1999) also stresses the extent to which Hitchcock was embedded within British culture, not simply cinematic but also literary and theatrical. He particularly focuses on the series of collaborations that Hitchcock enjoyed with the pre‐eminent scriptwriters of the period – Eliot Stannard in the 1920s, Alma Reville in the early sound period, Charles Bennett (and later Launder and Gilliat) for the thrillers of the later 1930s. The shift across studios also has its influence on film style, as does the choice of source material. More recently Barr has returned to Hitchcock’s very earliest involvement in filmmaking, re‐assessing his role in the studios at Islington (as a title designer, an art director, and as an assistant to Graham Cutts) before 1925 (Kerzoncuf and Barr 2015). This work ­challenges many of the myths that Hitchcock himself liked to foster about the



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incompetence of the filmmakers around him and of the British film industry ­generally. In particular, it has provided an opportunity for a re‐assessment of Cutts as a filmmaker  –  a welcome effect which reverses the tendency of previous auteurist writing which, in throwing light on the star director, had tended to leave other players in the shadows. Despite the extensive work on Hitchcock, other important British directors of the 1930s such as Walter Forde, Victor Saville, Maurice Elvey, and Marcel Varnel still await serious academic attention. More recent work has been less concerned with questions of national style and the ‘Britishness’ of our filmmaking tradition. Instead, there has been a move to acknowledge the very internationalism of British filmmaking during the 1930s. This acknowledgement was certainly made at the time, although not in particularly edifying terms. Graham Greene’s infamously xenophobic 1936 review of The Marriage of Corbal (Karl Grune, 1936) offers a startlingly unpleasant example. Noting the numerous foreign names among its production personnel, he wondered whether such films could even be called ‘British’. He darkly intimated that the Quota Act had ‘played into foreign hands’ and wrested the film industry from the Americans ‘only to surrender it to a far more alien control’. The article is not simply xenophobic. There is a hint of anti‐Semitism in its final lines: ‘Watching the dark alien executive tipping his cigar ash behind the glass partition in Wardour Street, the Hungarian producer … [and] the German director letting himself down into his canvas chair at Elstree’, Greene concluded, ‘I cannot help wondering whether from this great moneyed industry anything of value to the human spirit can ever emerge.’ In contrast to such sinister intimations, recent historians such as Kevin Gough‐ Yates (2009), Tim Bergfelder and Christian Carginelli (2008) have detailed what an extraordinarily energising effect the presence of European émigré workers had on the production scene in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. The international flow of film personnel (and of films themselves) was already a feature of the 1920s, and temporary and permanent professional movement intensified in the late 1920s and early 1930s as part of the network of co‐production deals and exchanges which characterised the Film Europe movement (Higson and Maltby 1999). Hitchcock famously worked in Germany and proclaimed himself greatly influenced by the techniques he saw practised there. He was not alone in making the trip, and French‐ and German‐speaking production personnel similarly came to Britain to work here on specific projects. After 1933, conditions in Germany meant that the flow of personnel into Britain increased as émigrés became exiles. Émigré workers contributed to fields across the board of film production, working as producers and directors of great renown (such as Alexander Korda, Max Schach, Karl Grune, E.A. Dupont, Paul Stein), but also as cinematographers (such as Werner Brandes and Gunther Krampf ), art directors (Alfred Junge), scriptwriters and stars (Conrad Veidt, Renate Muller, Richard Tauber). As Bergfelder (2008, p. 10) suggests, while some of these figures became firmly established in the British industry – Korda was often evoked almost as a synecdoche for British film itself – others were less

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successful. Bergfelder also warns against ascribing any particular aesthetic or narrative style to such figures, suggesting that to do so not only risks exaggerating the agency of individual workers within an overall industrial system, but also ‘resorts to reductive assumptions about the nature of foreign versus indigenous film styles’. Despite this, I would point out that perhaps the most critically neglected genre which flourished in British cinema of the 1930s is the one most closely associated with émigré producers – the Viennese‐style musical fantasy. Hitchcock dismissed his Waltzes of Vienna (Hitchcock, 1932) out of hand in later life, and his champions have been happy to follow his lead. However, it is just one example of a remarkably vibrant cycle of such European operetta films, many of which were closely associated with émigré performers and producers, and were produced by every major company in the period. ‘Mittel European’ musical fantasies such Goodnight Vienna (Herbert Wilcox, 1932), the Richard Tauber vehicle Blossom Time (Paul Stein, 1934), and Karl Grune’s truly extraordinary Pagliacci (Grune, 1936) (also starring Tauber) have received scant attention from writers whose concern has been to map representations of contemporary British life within the cinema of the period. Nevertheless, they form a sizable chunk of that cinema’s output. Other recent studies have sought to understand British film within the context of an international production and distribution market. Sarah Street’s (2002) study of the ways in which British films were distributed and advertised in America devotes two substantial chapters to the 1930s, while Mark Glancy’s (2013) study of the reception of American films by British audiences similarly devotes two chapters to this key decade. Amy Sargeant (2005, 2013) also emphasises the transnational nature of much of British film production of this period, for example, in her account of the adaptation of a Russian comic novel as a vehicle for the otherwise impeccably indigenous George Formby in the case of Keep Your Seats Please (Monty Banks, 1936). As Sargeant observes, ‘cultures can, and have, willingly plundered foreign materials in their fabrication of an indigenous identity’. I have purposely laboured my point about the international influences on the British film industry, and the contributions of foreign filmmakers to that industry, for these presences force us to question the efficacy of British cinema itself as a category. Such a move is not new in British film criticism. It is over 20 years since Pam Cook’s bracing observation that Almost everywhere one looks in critical writing about British cinema one finds a ­fixation on its ‘Britishness’ combined with a deep ambivalence about Britishness itself. This crisis at the heart of our film culture leads me to suspect that the desire for a British cinema with clearly defined national boundaries is probably impossible and in any case undesirable. (Cook 1996, p. 13)

The observation still bears repeating. It certainly offers us a new way of thinking about the statement that began this chapter. From the perspective of today, C.A.  Lejeune’s call for films about ‘British industry or British agriculture or … British mining’ does indeed sound like a desire for a ‘British cinema with clearly



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defined national boundaries’. In her eagerness to champion a British cinema that didn’t yet exist, she also managed to utterly negate the cinema she was actually engaged in writing about. Jew Suss was certainly not a cinema with ‘clearly defined national boundaries’. It was an adaptation of an internationally best‐selling novel by the German writer Lion Feuchwanger. Commissioned by Michael Balcon explicitly (as  Lejeune acknowledged) in response to the ‘political situation in Germany’, Jew Suss was a prestige project for Gaumont‐British  –  an expensive public acknowledgement (as far as the censor would allow it) of the political sympathies of the producers towards the Jews suffering oppression under the Nazi regime. For its star, Conrad Veidt, acceptance of the role had immediate personal consequences. Not Jewish himself, his public involvement in a film so clearly critical of the Nazi regime meant that he could not return to his native Germany, transforming him from an émigré to an exile (Germunden 2008, p. 148). Other émigré workers on the film included Lothar Mendes (director), Alfred Junge (art director), and Gunther Krampf (camera operator). They worked alongside British and American personnel. Balcon conceived the film to be such an important ­international production that, as Sue Harper (1998, p. 130) notes, he arranged for simultaneous premieres in London, New York, and Paris. There appears to be some confusion about the film’s success at the box office. Germunden suggests that it was not a box‐office success. Nevertheless, it appears as the second most popular British film of 1934 in John Sedgwick’s calculations (the fifth most popular film overall), rubbing shoulders with such internationally‐minded British fare as Catherine the Great (Paul Czinner, 1934), Blossom Time (Paul Stein, 1934) and Chu Chin Chow (Walter Forde, 1934) (Sedgwick 1998, p. 28). Sue Harper’s analysis of the box‐office figures for the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth (a cinema that she characterises as having a lower‐middle‐class clientele) suggests that the film was a medium success – the 16th most successful film out of 51 shown at the Regent in that year. Harper suggests that this figure indicates a ‘habit’ audience responding positively to more ‘culturally ambitious’, serious, and demanding filmmaking (Harper 2004, p. 574). Lejeune herself was less generous in her assessment of the audience’s capacity either to enjoy the film or to understand its contemporary ­resonances. ‘It  would, I think, be optimistic to suppose that Jew Suss represents entertainment for the masses’, she claimed, adding that ‘the average citizen in Britain or America today is not deeply interested in the court intrigues of the Duchy of Wurtemburg towards the end of the eighteenth century’. The figures from Sedgwick and Harper suggest perhaps that she was mistaken in this gloomy assessment of British audiences’ intellectual curiosity. The message of the film was not lost on others either. Jew Suss was banned by the Austrian government as ­philosemitic propaganda, and most famously, it prompted Goebbels to respond with his own radically different version, Jud Süß (Viet Harlan, 1940) – one of the most notorious anti‐Jewish fiction films to emerge from Nazi Germany (Tegel 2007, p. 134). Lejeune could not, of course, have known what the future held for Europe when she dismissed Jew Suss and called on British filmmakers to turn their attention to more important and more nationally specific subjects. Nevertheless,

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it is an indication of the tenacious grip of the critical orthodoxy she represented, and its myopic obsession with the ‘national’ story that Balcon could look back after the war and lament his failure to make films ‘reflecting the agony of the times’, and that while the Holocaust was fresh in their minds, Griffith and Rotha could with absolute approval quote her declaration that: With all the sympathy in the world for the oppressed Jew, I fancy that there are other problems worthy of being tackled by our native industry. At the cost of being repetitious…

References Aitken, Ian (1990). Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement. London: Routledge. Aldgate, Anthony (1983). Comedy, class and containment: the British domestic cinema of the 1930s. In: British Cinema History (ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter), 256–271. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Anon. (1936). Punch (18 November), p. 583. Antony, Scott (2011). The GPO film unit and “Britishness” in the 1930s. In: The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (ed. Scott Antony and James Mansell), 10–17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Armes, Roy (1978). A Critical History of British Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg. Balcon, Michael (1969). Michael Balcon Presents … A Lifetime of British Films. London: Hutchinson. Barr, Charles (1986). Amnesia and schizophrenia. In: All Our Yesterdays (ed. Charles Barr), 1–30. London: BFI Publishing. Barr, Charles (1999). English Hitchcock. Moffat: Cameron & Hollis. Bergfelder, Tim (1997). Surface and distraction: style and genre in Gainsborough in the late 1920s and 1930s. In: Gainsborough Pictures (ed. Pam Cook), 31–46. London: Cassell. Bergfelder, Tim (2008). Introduction: German‐speaking emigrés and British cinema, 1925–50: cultural exchange, exile and the boundaries of national cinema’. In: Destination London: German‐Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1930 (ed. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli), 1–23. Oxford: Berghahn. Bergfelder, Tim and Cargnelli, Christian (eds.) (2008). Destination London: German‐Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. Oxford: Berghahn. Chapman, James, Glancy, Mark, and Harper, Sue (2007). The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. London: Palgrave. Chibnall, Steve (2007). Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI Publishing. Cook, Pam (1996). Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema. London: BFI Publishing. Dickinson, Margaret and Street, Sarah (1985). Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government, 1927–84. London: BFI Publishing.



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Dodd, Kathryn and Dodd, Philip (1996). Engendering the nation: British documentary film 1930–39. In: Dissolving Views: Rethinking British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 38–50. London: Cassell. Durgnat, Raymond (1970). A Mirror for England. London: Faber & Faber. Ellis, John (1996). The quality film adventure: British critics and the cinema 1942–1948. In: Dissolving Views: Rethinking British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 66–93. London: Cassell. Germunden, Gerd (2008). Allegories of displacement: Conrad Veidt’s British films. In: Destination London: German‐Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950 (ed. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Carginelli), 142–154. Oxford: Berghahn. Glancy, Mark (2013). Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris. Gough‐Yates, Kevin (2009). Exiles and British cinema. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 124–132. London: BFI Palgrave. Greene, Graham. (1936). The Marriage of Corbel at the Leicester Square Theatre’. The Spectator (5 June) p. 1036. Harper, Sue (1998). “Thinking forward and up”: the British films of Conrad Veidt. In: The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939 (ed. Jeffrey Richards), 565–587. London: I.B. Tauris. Harper, Sue (2004). A lower middle‐class taste‐community in the 1930s: admission figures at the Regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24 (4): 565–587. Higson, Andrew (1995). Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, Andrew and Maltby, Richard (eds.) (1999). Film Europe, Film America. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Kerzoncuf, Alain and Barr, Charles (2015). Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Lejeune, C.A. (1934). ‘Jew Suss: a costly experiment in horror’. The Observer (7 October), p. 18. Lejeune, C.A. (1947). Chestnuts in Her Lap. London: Phoenix House. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000). Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema. London: Cassell. Napper, Lawrence (1997). A despicable tradition?: British quota quickies in the 1930s. In: The British Cinema Book (ed. Robert Murphy), 192–201. London: BFI Publishing. Napper, Lawrence (2009). British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Napper, Lawrence (2012). “No limit”: British class and comedy of the 1930s. In: British Comedy Cinema (ed. Ian Hunter and Larraine Porter), 38–50. London: Routledge. Richards, Jeffrey (1984). The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Richards, Jeffrey (1998). Tod Slaughter and the cinema of excess. In: The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939 (ed. Jeffrey Richards), 139–160. London: I.B. Tauris. Richards, Jeffrey (2011). John Grierson and the lost world of the GPO Film Unit. In: The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (ed. Scott Antony and James Mansell), 1–9. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Richards, Jeffrey and Sheridan, Dorothy (1987). Mass Observation at the Movies. London: Routledge. Rotha, Paul and Griffith, Richard (1967). The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema. London: Spring Books. Ryall, Tom (1986). Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema. London: Croom Helm. Sargeant, Amy (2005). British Cinema: A Critical and Interpretive Survey. London: BFI Publishing. Sargeant, Amy (2013). 4 x 12 chairs. Interfaces 34: 49–60. Sedgwick, John (1998). Cinema‐going preferences in the 1930s. In: The Unknown 1930s: An  Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939 (ed. Jeffrey Richards), 1–36. London: I.B. Tauris. Sedgwick, John (2001). Popular Filmgoing in the 1930s: A Choice of Pleasures. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Shafer, Stephen (ed.) (1997). British Popular Films 1929–1939: The Cinema of Reassurance. London: Routledge. Stead, Peter (1989). Film and the Working Class. London: Routledge. Stollery, Martin (2000). Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Street, Sarah (2002). Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. London: Continuum. Street, Sarah (2005). “Got to dance my way to heaven”: Jessie Matthews, Art Deco and the British musical of the 1930s. Studies in European Cinema 2 (1): 19–29. Tegel, Susan (2007). Nazis and the Cinema. London: Continuum. Wood, Robin (1989). Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press.

4

British Cinema and the Second World War James Chapman

Introduction The Second World War is widely regarded as a ‘Golden Age’ for British cinema. It is seen as the period in which a distinctively British national cinema emerged with films that drew both critical and popular acclaim, and  –  unlike previous attempts at forging a national cinema in Britain in the 1920s and the 1930s – could match the best of Hollywood in quality. And unlike some Golden Ages, it was also evident to contemporaries: the idea that British films came into their own during the war was a feature of the critical discourses of the time. ‘Everyone recognises now that there has been an extraordinary renaissance in British feature‐film production since about 1940’, remarked film critic and historian Roger Manvell in the first post‐war edition of his Penguin paperback, Film (Manvell 1946, p. 133). Manvell attributed this renaissance to the work of filmmakers who had reached their ‘maturity’ during the war: Michael Powell, Carol Reed, David Lean, Roy and John Boulting, Thorold Dickinson, Charles Frend, Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder, Harry Watt, John Baxter and Basil Dearden. Manvell continued: This new vitality, this new individuality, are of essential importance to British cinema, and they are a direct product of the war years. They are in reaction to the streamlined showmanship of Hollywood. The work of these directors is greatly influenced by pre‐war and wartime documentary. It is bound to the national life of Britain, to our people, our cities and our rich and varied countryside. (Manvell 1946, p. 136)

Manvell therefore effectively set the terms of reference in which British wartime cinema has been discussed ever since: as a direct outcome of the historical and A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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ideological conditions of the war, as a national cinema distinct from Hollywood, and as a film practice that privileged realism and drew strongly upon the form and practices of the documentary movement.

The Second World War and the Golden Age Narrative Like all such metaphors, the idea of a Golden Age requires scrutiny and interrogation if it is to be more than just a piece of discursive rhetoric. On one level it is certainly appropriate: the Second World War marked the high‐point of cinema as a social practice in Britain. In 1943, the Wartime Social Survey found that 70% of the adult population attended the cinema and that around a third were regular cinema‐goers who saw at least one film show a week (Aldgate and Richards 1986, p. 3). The number of weekly cinema attendances in Britain rose from around 19 million in 1939 to a peak of 30 million in 1945. On the face of it this would suggest a buoyant film industry and a vigorous popular film culture. However, the popularity of cinema‐going with the public disguised a number of deep‐rooted structural problems in the film industry. The trade press – Kinematograph Weekly, Today’s Cinema, and the Daily Film Renter – noted the upturn in attendances but was also concerned about the closure of studios, the conscription of film industry personnel for military service, and the fragile economic base of the production sector. A recurring issue throughout much of 1940, for example, was the campaign to set up a government‐sponsored Films Bank to alleviate the chronic uncertainty affecting production. Although nothing emerged in the short term, the discussions between the film trade and the Treasury set the framework for the establishment of the National Film Finance Corporation in the late 1940s (Street and Dickinson 1985, pp. 129–139). A powerful aspect of the Golden Age narrative is the idea that British films ­flourished despite the economic and structural problems affecting the industry. Here there is a tendency to draw a parallel with the wider war situation: just as the imposition of food rationing is held to have brought improvements in public health, so too the quality of British films improved as a consequence of wartime austerity and following the profligate expenditure of the 1930s (Barr 1989, p. 261). The most expensive British production of the war was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) at a cost of around £475 000 but that was something of an exceptional case: official records suggest that films costing over £100 000 were rare.1 The Rank Organisation’s attempt to challenge the hegemony of Hollywood with a cycle of expensively mounted films intended for the world market did not begin in earnest until 1945. For much of the war, the British production sector was characterised by modestly budgeted films that made a virtue of their economy. Indeed, the visual style of some of the most acclaimed British



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wartime films seemed to reflect the prevailing mood of austerity. Eric Rhode writes of Target for Tonight (1941) – the first of a cycle of story‐documentaries produced by the government‐controlled Crown Film Unit  –  that it ‘capture[s] the austerity of the period with a zeal so puritanical that it begins to assume the conviction of a style’ (Rhode 1976, p. 372). John Ellis (1996) has shown how contemporary critical discourses  –  as represented by broadly ‘middle‐brow’ film critics such as Arthur Vesselo (Sight and Sound), C. A. Lejeune (The Observer), Dilys Powell (The Sunday Times), William Whitebait (The New Statesman), and Richard Winnington (News Chronicle)  – promoted an idea of ‘quality’ cinema based on realist narratives and aesthetics. For British critics, realism meant socially authentic characters and situations, the adoption of documentary techniques and practices, a sober, pared‐down visual style, and unsensational narratives that privileged qualities of stoicism and emotional restraint in preference to the melodrama and emotional excess associated with Hollywood. This led to the emergence of a distinction – as conventionally defined – between ‘realism’ and ‘tinsel’ in which the former was identified mostly with British films and with documentary while the latter was identified with Hollywood but also with those British films that did not accord with the realist aesthetic.2 Manvell’s list of the most significant British films of the war, for example, is dominated by realist war films (49th Parallel, In Which We Serve, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, The First of the Few, The Foreman Went to France, The Next of Kin, San Demetrio, London, Nine Men, We Dive at Dawn, The Way Ahead, The Way to the Stars, Journey Together) and realist present‐day dramas (Love on the Dole, The Common Touch, Thursday’s Child, Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, The Lamp Still Burns, This Happy Breed, Waterloo Road, Johnny Frenchman, Brief Encounter, The Rake’s Progress) but contains far fewer costume/period films (Kipps, The Prime Minister, Fanny by Gaslight) or films including elements of fantasy or non‐naturalism (Thunder Rock, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Dead of Night). A good example of how critics privileged a certain kind of film at the expense of another is provided by Richard Winning ton’s review of Powell and Pressburger’s fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1946) which he described as being ‘even farther away from the essential realism and true business of the British movie than their two recent films I Know Where I’m Going and [A] Canterbury Tale’ (Winnington 1949, p. 69). The realist impulse in British wartime cinema was attributed, at the time and since, to the influence of documentary. It would be fair to say that, for all the critical prestige attached to it, documentary had been a relatively marginal mode of film practice before the war. It was during the war, however, that documentary crossed over into the mainstream of British cinema through the box‐office success of official films such as Target for Tonight and Desert Victory (1943). The documentarist John Shearman (1946) was the first specifically to use the term ‘wartime wedding’ to describe the cross‐over in techniques between documentary and the commercial sector of the film industry, though the same idea is evident in film

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criticism by the middle of the war. Consider, for example, the review of We Dive at Dawn (1943) by the film critic of The Times on 20 May 1943: Generally speaking, the best British films have been those which … have blended the discipline of the documentary with a minimum amount of the story‐teller’s licence and have gone about the work of showing how normal men react to the normal strains and stresses of war.

Most of the now‐canonical films of British wartime cinema exemplify this merger between fiction and documentary.

Traditional Film Histories and the Formation of the Canon The cultural and aesthetic discourses of wartime film criticism exerted a strong influence on the first histories of British cinema. This may be attributed to the fact that several of the first generation of British film historians – including Paul Rotha and Griffith (1967) and Roger Manvell (1974) – had themselves been involved in wartime film culture. Rotha had been one of the foremost independent documentarists, producing films commissioned by the Ministry of Information (MOI), while Manvell had been a regional films officer for the MOI, arranging non‐ theatrical screenings for those who could not easily attend commercial cinemas, such as shift workers. These first‐generation histories – also exemplified by general film histories such as those of Eric Rhode (1976) and another ex‐documentarist Basil Wright (1974) – all reinforced the existing critical model of British wartime cinema that privileged documentary and the realist aesthetic at the expense of other modes and styles. A core group of films emerged that quickly assumed canonical status: the titles most commonly cited include In Which We Serve (1942), The First of the Few (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), Millions Like Us (1943), San Demetrio, London (1943), The Way Ahead (1944), and The Way to the Stars (1945) which can all be seen as prime examples of the ‘wartime wedding’ between the commercial cinema and documentary. It is significant, furthermore, that all these canonical wartime films date from the middle and later years of the war. Earlier wartime features such as Convoy (1940) and Dangerous Moonlight (1941) are neglected on the grounds that they do not fit this paradigm: they are deemed insufficiently realistic and too melodramatic. Manvell identifies 1942 as the point of critical mass for the emergence of what he calls the ‘war documentary’: 1942 was to be one of the richest periods for the war film in Britain. It was the year in which human considerations began to overcome the jingoistic nationalism with which most countries blinkered themselves at the beginning of the war. Similarly, the ‘war story’ with a patriotic slant began to give place to the ‘war documentary’, which derived the action and to a greater extent the characterization from real events and real people. (Manvell 1974, p. 101)



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For Manvell, and for most others, the key transitional film is In Which We Serve, on one level, a patriotic epic of the Royal Navy but, on another level, one that, unlike previous naval dramas such as Convoy, focused equally on other ranks as well as the officers and was inspired by real events: it is well documented that writer and co‐director Noël Coward based it on Lord Mountbatten and the sinking of HMS Kelly (Aldgate and Richards 1986, p. 194). The dominant interpretation of the canonical films in these traditional histories is to see them as narratives of nationhood and consensus. In this reading the ­ideological project of British wartime cinema was to construct a narrative of national unity and social cohesion in the face of adversity. It is no coincidence that all the canonical films feature characters from a wide range of social and class backgrounds overcoming their personal differences for the greater good of the nation. Many British wartime films focus not on heroic individuals but on socially diverse groups who symbolise the nation at war: the ship’s company of In Which We Serve, the army platoons of Nine Men and The Way Ahead, the firemen of Fires Were Started and the factory workers of Millions Like Us. The overcoming of class divisions in films such as Millions Like Us and The Way Ahead is often understood as a reflection of the greater social mobility experienced during the war. The recurring narrative motif is the ‘people’s war’: a democratic community mobilising voluntarily for war and everyone doing their bit. It is a spirit best demonstrated in official documentaries – admittedly produced with the aim of boosting morale – such as the shorts Britain Can Take It! (1940) and Listen to Britain (1942). It is also no coincidence that films which question or challenge this narrative, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), tend to be absent from the old canon. The wartime films of Ealing Studios  –  including The Foreman Went to France (1942), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Bells Go Down (1943), Nine Men (1943), and San Demetrio, London – have been seen as particularly representative of the ideologies and ethos of British wartime cinema. Ealing, under its head of production Michael Balcon, fully embraced the ‘wartime wedding’ between the fiction film and documentary: it even recruited leading documentarists Alberto Cavalcanti (Went the Day Well?) and Harry Watt (Nine Men) from the Crown Film Unit. Charles Barr’s important study of Ealing (1977) identifies a ‘broad congruency’ between the studio’s war films – most of which were made by a small group of directors (Cavalcanti, Watt, Basil Dearden, Charles Frend, Charles Crichton) and writers ( John Dighton, Diana Morgan, Angus MacPhail, T.E.B. Clarke) – and the nation as a whole in which films such as The Foreman Went to France, Went the Day Well? and San Demetrio, London ‘embody classic British qualities of team spirit and good‐ humoured doggedness’ (Barr 1977, p. 13). San Demetrio, London – based on a true incident in which the crew of a stricken petrol tanker bring it successfully home – is claimed as ‘the culmination of Ealing’s war programme, [and] the ideal fulfilment of Balcon’s policy’ (Barr 1977, p. 35). Yet the classic Ealing war films all date from a quite specific period in the middle of the war: 1942–1943. Its earlier efforts including Convoy and the Fleet Air Arm epic Ships With Wings (1941) – the latter in particular was derided by progressive critics for its recourse to Boy’s Own

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Paper‐style heroics – were more melodramatic affairs which demonstrate that the emergence of the documentary‐style feature film was neither inevitable nor a case of linear progress from one mode to another. Barr cautions ‘against trying to fit every film into too neat a pattern of development’ (Barr 1977, p. 25). He also shows that Ealing’s wartime output comprised more than just realist war films but also included comedies (the films of George Formby and Will Hay) and other genres such as musical comedy (Fiddlers Three, 1944) and horror (Dead of Night, 1945) that do not fit into the documentary‐realist tradition. To the extent that it acknowledges films outside the realist canon, Barr’s Ealing Studios may be considered the first partially revisionist history of British wartime cinema.

National Fictions and the Ideological Critique of British Wartime Cinema Although the rise of ‘screen theory’ in the 1970s and the 1980s largely bypassed British cinema, the publication of Geoff Hurd’s edited volume National Fictions in 1985 – including essays by several critics associated with the film theory journal Screen, including Steve Neale, Christine Gledhill, Christine Geraghty, Andrew Higson, and Andy Medhurst – marked an important intervention in the critical ­discourses around British cinema of the Second World War. National Fictions should be understood in the intellectual context of ‘screen theory’ and its rejection of conventional aesthetic criticism (such as a preference for realism) in favour of a more ideological analysis informed by Marxist/Marxisant theories, particularly Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Louis Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses. National Fictions  –  which arose from the 1984 British Film Institute Summer School of the same name  –  was ‘concerned to demonstrate the extent to which the meanings accruing to a specific “event” or “period” (the Second World War) are constructed, hence subject to contestation, struggle, transformation and change’ (Higson and Neale 1985, p. 73). The collection includes some essays on specific films, including those by Gledhill and Higson, while others seek more generally to construct an ideological basis for wartime cinema. But they all share a consistent intellectual position and employ the same discursive language: hence it seems appropriate to describe them collectively as the National Fictions School. For the National Fictions School, the Second World War represents something of an ideological paradox. On the one hand, it is celebrated as a moment of national greatness and achievement: the ‘cultural memory’ of the war focuses on the Churchillian narrative of ‘their finest hour’ and emphasises the unity and solidarity of the British nation at war. On the other hand, it was a period that saw the advance of the left in national politics, exemplified by the phenomenon of ‘War Socialism’, the popular support



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for the Beveridge Report of 1942, and finding its ultimate expression in the election of Britain’s first majority Labour government in 1945. Charles Barr – although not himself a member of the National Fictions School per se – points out how these narratives can be read into wartime films: For the Right, as demonstrated in the shameless rhetoric of the 1986 [sic] Tory election broadcasts, the war signifies pride in national defence under a belligerent Conservative leader. Emblematic film image: In Which We Serve, Noël Coward on the bridge of HMS Great Britain. For the Left, it means a glimpse of socialism in action, of the achievements possible when class hierarchies and the tyranny of the marketplace are relaxed. Emblematic image: the fire‐fighting team coming together in Fires Were Started. (Barr 1989, pp. 261–262) (Figure 4.1)

These narratives may be present in the same films: Millions Like Us and The Way Ahead, for example, while largely conforming to the dominant narrative of national unity, nevertheless find some space to address people’s expectations for the post‐ war world and can therefore be seen as components of a popular discourse of reform and reconstruction that nourished the ideological conditions for the election of the post‐war Labour government. While the specific films discussed in National Fictions include many of the canonical texts favoured by the traditional histories, the method of analysis is very different.

Figure 4.1  ‘Emblematic film image’: Noël Coward in In Which We Serve (1942).

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National Fictions rejects the idea of wartime films as a straightforward reflection or mirror of British society and understands them instead as ideological texts which seek to construct a narrative of nationhood and which employ formal components (such as voice‐over narration) to create a favoured reading position. This results in more nuanced readings of the films: in particular, the National Fictions School ­highlights the tension that sometimes emerges in wartime cinema over its representation of nationhood and identity. Andrew Higson’s analysis of The Bells Go Down, Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, and This Happy Breed, for example, concludes that ‘the image of the nation which these films construct can never be homogenous and coherent’ (Higson 1985, p. 26). And Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson’s analysis of the role and representation of women in wartime films ­concludes that despite the greater narrative space allowed for female protagonists in films such as The Gentle Sex (1943) and Millions Like Us, they ultimately reinforce a traditional patriarchal discourse that seeks to position women in the home: here the tension arises between their progressive social politics on the surface and the more conservative ideologies that structure their narratives (Gledhill and Swanson 1985). However, for all the theoretical rigour of its reading strategies, National Fictions failed to challenge the critical orthodoxy by extending the corpus of films beyond the canonical texts, while the emphasis on ideology and hegemony leads some contributors into some not entirely convincing comparisons ­between wartime politics and the cultural politics of Thatcherism. To this extent, National Fictions provides a good example of how film criticism may be informed by the ideological contexts of the present as well as the aesthetics of the past. However, the real importance of National Fictions was that it provided the stimulus for further critical work, including important studies of British national cinema by Andrew Higson (1995) and of wartime femininity by Antonia Lant (1991) and Gledhill and Swanson (1996). Higson’s Waving the Flag challenges the centrality of the war to the project of a British national cinema by examining ­different production and aesthetic strategies in previous decades – including the proto‐heritage films of the 1920s and the distinction between an international and a domestic cinema in the 1930s. In this sense, the wartime realist films might be seen as much as a reaction to the extravagance and excess of spectacular 1930s films such as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Evergreen (1935) as specific products of wartime conditions. The emergence of feminist studies of wartime cinema can be related directly back to National Fictions but a characteristic of both Antonia Lant’s Blackout and Gledhill and Swanson’s Nationalising Femininity is that they relate the representation of women in films to wider social and cultural discourses around wartime femininity. Lant, for example, uses the wartime ‘blackout’ as a metaphor for the invisibility of women in standard histories of British cinema. These studies acknowledge, again, the contradictory nature of wartime representations: the popularisation of the ‘mobile woman’, on the one hand, (Millions Like Us remains the prime example) against the anxiety over



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the increased social mobility (and therefore sexual opportunities) for women on the other. These tensions are rehearsed in late‐war melodramas such as Waterloo Road (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945).

Revisionist Histories and the Role of the Ministry of Information An alternative to the National Fictions school can be found in the work of a group of film historians – including Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards (1986), James Chapman (1998), Sue Harper (1994), Paul MacKenzie (2001), Robert Murphy (1989), and Philip M. Taylor (1988) – whose approach asserts the importance of empirical source‐based history rather than either formal analysis or ideological criticism. All these scholars have also contributed to the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and collectively their work may be seen as part of the ‘historical turn’ in film studies following the eclipse of ‘screen theory’ in the 1980s. The emergence of this school was largely an outcome of the release of official documents relating to wartime filmmaking in the Public Records Office (now The National Archives) under the Thirty‐Year Rule which for the first time allowed historians to undertake research into the institutional and ideological contexts in which films were produced. In particular, the role of the MOI in directing and facilitating wartime filmmaking has now come to light. There have been studies of the organisation and policies of the MOI and its Films Division (Chapman 1998), accounts of how different branches of the services sought to influence their representation in films (MacKenzie 2001), and detailed production and reception histories of a wide range of individual films (Aldgate and Richards 1986). This work has done much to challenge received wisdoms about wartime filmmaking and has led to a reassessment of some films marginalised by the orthodox realist discourse. The MOI was Britain’s wartime counterpart to the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment: liberal democracies tended to frown on the idea of ‘propaganda’ and preferred ‘information’ to describe their activities. The Films Division was responsible both for the commissioning of official films (mostly shorts and documentaries) and for advising feature film producers of the sort of subjects and themes it would like to see treated. In the old histories, the MOI barely warranted mention and the few references it did get were dismissive in the extreme. The MOI never really shook off the reputation it gained at the beginning of the war as the ‘Ministry of Dis‐Information’ or ‘Ministry of Muddle’: its early history was characterised by chronic institutional instability (four ministers and three directors of its Films Division within the first two years of the war) and bureaucratic inertia: Paul Rotha complained that too often ‘[a] film tended to

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become a file and not a film’ (Rotha 1958, p. 234). This may be because Rotha and other documentary filmmakers felt they had been marginalised and their expertise neglected at the beginning of the war. However, Rotha’s assessment is at odds with Michael Powell’s view that ‘[the] Ministry of Information was a great success and its Films Division was one of its triumphs’ (Powell 1986, p. 383). Revisionist histories have arrived at a nuanced account of the MOI that acknowledges both its achievements and its mistakes. Following its hesitant start, the MOI developed a coherent policy for film propaganda that identified specific roles for each of the three main modes of film practice: feature films, documentary, and the newsreels. It took over control of the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit (which became the Crown Film Unit at the end of 1940) and commissioned a wide range of documentary films from the independent documentary units. As far as the feature film industry was concerned, the MOI sponsored one film, 49th Parallel (1941), but thereafter preferred to work independently with producers in advising them on the sort of subjects and themes it would like to see treated in films. Here there is evidence that the MOI supported the production of realist‐style films. In 1943, for example, it told the British Film Producers’ Association that what it wanted were ‘first‐class war subjects realistically treated; realistic films of everyday life; [and] high quality entertainment films’, but that it disapproved of ‘war subjects exploited for cheap sensationalism; the morbid and the maudlin; [or] entertainment stories which are stereotyped or hackneyed and unlikely because of their theme or general character to reflect well upon this country at home and abroad’ (quoted in Chapman 1998, p. 80). Hence the MOI demonstrated the same aesthetic preferences as the middle‐brow film critics: to this extent the wartime imperative for realism can be seen at least in part as having been officially mandated. The picture that emerges from revisionist histories is that most of the time the MOI and the commercial film industry experienced a close and co‐operative working relationship that was built on a foundation of consensus. The MOI would ‘advise’ on subjects and would help to facilitate films by arranging for the release of personnel from the services and the provision of service facilities: Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Way Ahead (1944) were two of the films that emerged in this way. However, there were occasional points of friction. The most notorious case was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), loosely based on the satirical cartoons of David Low which suggested that the persistence of a reactionary military caste was undermining the British Army’s ability to fight a total war (Figure 4.2). In fact, it was not the MOI that took exception to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film but the War Office and the Prime Minister himself. Churchill was so incensed when he heard about the production of the film that he instructed the MOI ‘to stop this foolish production before it gets any further’ (quoted in Chapman 1998, p. 84). Ian Christie has suggested that the Colonel Blimp affair ‘­provides further evidence of Churchill’s autocratic control over all aspects of the war machinery’ (Christie 1978, p. 111). Yet, in the event, Churchill was not able to suppress the film: Brendan Bracken, his Minister of Information, tactfully pointed



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Figure 4.2  Wartime controversy: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).

out that to do so would look heavy‐handed – not an impression the MOI wanted to create when so much of its propaganda effort was directed at differentiating democratic Britain from the totalitarian regime it was fighting – and that in any event it did not have the powers to do so (Chapman 1995). Ultimately what the Colonel Blimp controversy revealed was the limits of the power of the state and the potential for committed filmmakers to depart ideologically from the semi‐official consensus of wartime cinema. Revisionist histories have also cast the role of Michael Balcon and Ealing Studios in a different light. In official records, Balcon emerges as something of an irritant for the MOI. He complained loudly about preferential treatment for official film units such as Crown which he felt were competing on unequal terms with commercial producers. Balcon felt that the MOI should not produce its own films but instead should commission them from external contractors. In 1940, he even made an abortive attempt to take over control of the GPO Film Unit and base it at Ealing – a move that was partly connected to the recruitment of Alberto Cavalcanti from the unit. The episode caused bad blood between Balcon and the MOI and brought about a schism between the two parties that resulted, in December 1940, in Ealing announcing publicly that it would no longer make films for the MOI and would go its own way in the production of propaganda films (Chapman 1998, pp. 123–124). There is evidence that the MOI attempted to block the production of

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Ealing’s The Big Blockade (1941) and opposed the release of The Next of Kin (1942) in America because its climax included heavy British casualties in an operation that bore uncanny similarities to the Dieppe Raid. This challenges the orthodox narrative that places Ealing at the heart of the wartime filmmaking effort and sees the studio as fully integrated into the official machinery of film propaganda. A further outcome of the revisionist school has been to cast light on the role of short films and documentaries in the wartime propaganda effort as well as the feature film. The MOI commissioned over 1400 shorts during the war: these ranged from short informational items such as the ubiquitous ‘food flashes’ to two‐ and three‐reel documentaries such as Squadron 992 (1940) and Men of the Lightship (1940) – the latter an early wartime example of the narrative‐documentary technique. In 1940, the MOI brokered an arrangement with the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association to provide space for an official ‘five‐minute film’ to be shown weekly in all cinema programmes. From 1942, this became a monthly film of 15 minutes. However, the majority of official documentaries were distributed non‐theatrically, through a fleet of mobile projection units which held film shows in factories, schools, and village halls. A particularly significant feature of wartime documentary production was the emphasis on regional issues and identity, exemplified in non‐theatrical shorts such as Tyneside Story (1943), about the reconstruction of the north‐eastern ship‐building industry, and Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain (1943), exploring the legacy of unemployment in the Welsh farming and mining industries (see also Petrie 2000 and Hill 2006, on Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively). Although the impact and influence of these films are difficult to quantify, they evidently played some role in raising people’s expectations about post‐war social and economic reform (Chapman 2015, pp. 114–122).

Histories of Reception and Audiences Much of the recent research into British wartime cinema has seen a shift away from entirely production‐centred histories in favour of histories of film reception and cinema audiences. This is consistent with a trend across film history as a whole which has seen a move from text‐based histories (film history as the history of films) to broader contextual histories of exhibition and cinema‐going in which the films themselves are no longer the main focus of attention. This has brought about a broader‐based understanding of wartime film culture that extends beyond the canonical films and institutional histories of filmmaking to take into account the nature and composition of the cinema audience and questions of popular taste. The chief beneficiaries of this process as far as films are concerned have been the costume melodramas produced by Gainsborough Pictures beginning with The  Man in Grey (1943). These films  –  also including Fanny by Gaslight (1944),



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Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), and The Wicked Lady (1945) – were derided by contemporary critics for their melodramatic style and entire lack of period ­authenticity. But they were enormously popular with audiences, who revelled in their escapism and evidently welcomed them as a tonic after several hard years of war. The Gainsborough melodramas have been subject to sympathetic reclamation by critics who see their melodrama and visual excess as performing a r­ itualistic function that accorded with the cultural tastes of late wartime (and predominantly female) audiences (Harper 1994; Cook 1996). In fact, the history of wartime cinema‐going reveals quite considerable fluctuations in popular film taste. A caveat needs to be lodged here in that there are no reliable box‐office statistics for this period: historians have to rely on other sources such as the annual surveys of ‘hits’ provided by the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly. These suggest that war films were at their most popular between 1940 and 1943 when Convoy, 49th Parallel, The First of the Few, and In Which We Serve were the  top British box‐office attractions over four successive years (Murphy 1989, pp.  234–241). The presence of Convoy, a film that did not meet the criteria of realism demanded by middle‐brow critics, suggests that critical preferences and popular taste were not necessarily always in alignment. This becomes even more apparent when we consider that the films which consistently featured among the leading box‐office attractions during the war were escapist Hollywood melodramas: Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Mrs Miniver, Random Harvest, Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The White Cliffs of Dover (Murphy 1989, pp. 234–241). This pattern is confirmed by the wide‐ranging survey of popular film preferences ­conducted by the independent social survey organisation, Mass Observation, in 1943: the favourite films named by Mass Observation respondents ‘mirrors almost exactly the choice of the nation’ (Richards and Sheridan 1987, p. 221). From 1943, however, there is a marked shift away from war subjects – San Demetrio, London, for example, did not fare so well with the public as with the critics – in favour of non‐war films such as This Happy Breed (1944), Fanny by Gaslight and The Seventh Veil (1945). The picture becomes more complicated when we take into account local variations in film tastes. There have been a number of case‐studies of exhibition ­patterns at individual cinemas where attendance records have survived. These sometimes highlight significant local variations from the national picture. Julian Poole’s study of the Majestic cinema in the Derbyshire town of Macclesfield indicates that patriotic films like In Which We Serve competed with low‐brow British comedies (especially the films of George Formby) and Hollywood melodramas for top honours, while ‘quality’ British films such as Millions Like Us and Waterloo Road fared less well. Poole concludes that the Majestic returns ‘show that those films which have attracted historians, critics and scholars of British cinema both at the time and since were the very ones which had lowest appeal’ (Poole 1987, p. 30). The impact of changing demographic patterns on film consumption is highlighted by Sue Harper’s study of the Regent cinema in the southern coastal town of

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Portsmouth. The Regent was the biggest and most luxurious of Portsmouth’s ­cinemas and before the war its regular clientele had been mostly lower‐middle class with a taste for more sophisticated and even challenging films. However, the nature of the Regent’s audiences changed markedly during the war when it was patronised by transient workers and servicemen stationed in the city. This had two consequences: the greater popularity of American films in preference to British among the top hits and the increasing prominence in the schedules of low‐brow genre films (comedies, westerns, thrillers) that had been shunned by its pre‐war patrons. Harper concludes ‘that Regent taste in the war years was much more low‐brow, and that the male service audience was in evidence with the thriller and cowboy favourites’ (Harper 2006). The trade press and case‐studies of cinema attendances provide largely quantitative evidence of film taste: they tell us which films were popular but do not reveal what audiences actually thought of them. Other sources provide more qualitative evidence of reception: and here again some significant differences have emerged. Mass Observation undertook several investigations into cinema‐ goers’ responses to specific films: these included The Lion Has Wings (1939), Let George Do It! (1940), The Great Dictator (1940), and Ships with Wings (1941). The case of Ships with Wings is a good example of how the examination of primary sources may bring about a re‐evaluation of the significance of particular films. This film about the Fleet Air Arm (which included some location footage shot on board aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal) was held up by the old historians as an example of what British war films should not be: a sensational melodrama that focused on implausible individual heroics rather than the team ethos of later naval war films such as In Which We Serve and We Dive at Dawn. The film was so absurd that Documentary News Letter  –  a small‐circulation but highly influential publication that during the war represented the voice of progressive documentary – remarked scornfully that ‘the propaganda line of the film would be more appropriate to a Ruritanian campaign than the Second World War’ (quoted in Chapman 1998, p. 198). However, Jeffrey Richards – basing his study on reviews in  a wide range of periodicals as well as the survey by Mass Observation  – ­demonstrates that the film was well received by the popular and trade press and that it was liked by audiences, including in naval towns (Portsmouth, Chatham) as well as in provincial cities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff ) and London (Richards 1987). The Mass Observation survey suggests that audiences were aware of the film’s lack of authenticity but that this did not affect their enjoyment: hence the assumption that realism should be the preferred aesthetic of British war films is called into question. Another source of quantitative evidence regarding popular film taste is provided by contemporary fan magazines. These sources have generally been ignored by film historians in preference for more middle‐brow film journals such as the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound or the (post‐war) Penguin Film Review. But fan ­magazines, which regularly published letters from ordinary cinema‐goers, offer an



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insight into popular (as opposed to intellectual) film culture. Mark Glancy’s analysis of the British fan magazine Picturegoer between 1939 and 1945 demonstrates how the fan press ‘serves as a reminder of the complexities of the past, and the challenge of rediscovering the disposition, attitude and opinions of historical audiences’ (Glancy 2011, p. 474). Picturegoer was the leading fan magazine in Britain with a circulation of around 325 000 by the end of the Second World War (a figure far in excess of the critically influential Documentary News Letter) and a readership biased towards women and the working classes (hence making it broadly representative of the cinema audience as a whole). The most striking conclusion of Glancy’s research is that popular taste was broader and much more catholic than had previously been assumed. There is less evidence of a clear‐ cut distinction between the middle‐brow and the popular that pervades other accounts of film culture: Picturegoer’s readers were happy to discuss The Magnificent Ambersons alongside Tarzan and the Amazons. Glancy argues, persuasively, that Picturegoer ‘walked a fine line between stoking debates and manufacturing a consensus within popular film culture that was riddled with doubts’ – doubts that included the tension between escapism and propaganda – and that, viewed as a historical source, it ‘represents a more diverse film culture than most accounts of wartime British cinema suggest’ (Glancy 2011, p. 474). It will be clear that the critical and historical debates over British cinema during the Second World War have moved far beyond the orthodox narrative of the first generation of British film historians. This can be seen as part of a wider intellectual development in British film studies in general that over the last three decades has seen the traditional dominance of realist aesthetics challenged, and the emergence of a critical project to explore what Julian Petley appropriately termed ‘the lost continent’ of British cinema (Petley 1986). It is likely that no amount of historical revisionism will ever entirely displace the documentary‐realist canon from its central place in accounts of British wartime cinema: films such as In Which We Serve and Millions Like Us were seen at the time and since as evidence of the emergence of a new kind of British film that was not only distinct from Hollywood but also seemed to be speaking of and for their moment in a way that British films had rarely achieved before. In this sense the ideological import of British wartime cinema is closely tied in with the wider historical experience of the Second World War. At the same time, however, revisionist histories have shown that there was much more to wartime film culture than the conventional narrative would allow. To acknowledge the greater diversity of British film culture during the war does not undermine the cultural and aesthetic significance of the canon. Ultimately what both the traditional and the revisionist accounts have shown is that this was a period when there was significant cultural and ideological investment in the idea of British cinema. To put it another way, British film mattered: it mattered to audiences, to critics, and to the government. This was rarely the case before and it has not very often been the case since. To this extent, the Second World War does indeed merit the label of the Golden Age of British cinema.

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Notes 1 National Archives, Kew, BT 64/30. This file contains a document detailing the ­estimated production costs of around 60 British feature films between 1941 and 1943. The most expensive films on the list are The Demi‐Paradise (£185 176), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (£163 502) and The First of the Few (£141 626). The cheapest studio was British National whose films were all under £50 000. Ealing’s films were in the middle of the budget range, e.g. Ships with Wings (£67 177), The Foreman Went to France (£69 604), The Bells Go Down (£74 974), Undercover (£84 881). 2 Michael Balcon (1943) was the first to use these terms in a lecture for the Workers’ Film Association in which he equated ‘tinsel’ with adaptations of stage plays and ‘realism’ with ‘the use of naturalistic backgrounds and naturalistic human interest’ associated with documentary films (Balcon 1943, p. 4). Robert Murphy (1989) adopted the terms for his study of British films of the 1940s, covering both the wartime and post‐war years which includes substantial coverage of critically maligned genres such as costume melodrama, crime thrillers, and low‐brow comedy, as well as the tradition of ‘quality’ represented by documentary‐realist films and prestigious literary adaptations.

References Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey (1986). Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Balcon, Michael (1943). Realism or Tinsel. Brighton: Workers Film Association. Barr, Charles (1977). Ealing Studios. Newton Abbot and London: Cameron & Tayleur/ David & Charles. Barr, Charles (1989). War record. Sight and Sound 58 (4): 260–265. Chapman, James (1995). The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) reconsidered. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15 (1): 19–54. Chapman, James (1998). The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945. London: I.B. Tauris. Chapman, James (2015). A New History of British Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Christie, Ian (1978). Blimp, Churchill and the state. In: Powell, Pressburger and Others (ed. Ian Christie), 105–120. London: British Film Institute. Cook, Pam (1996). Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Ellis, John (1996). The quality film adventure: British critics and the cinema 1942–1948. In:  Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 66–93. London: Cassell. Glancy, Mark (2011). Picturegoer: the fan magazine and popular film culture in Britain during the Second World War. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31 (4): 453–478. Gledhill, Christine and Swanson, Gillian (1985). Gender and sexuality in Second World War films – a feminist approach. In: National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (ed. Geoff Hurd), 56–62. London: British Film Institute. Gledhill, Christine and Swanson, Gillian (1996). Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality, and British Cinema in the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.



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Harper, Sue (1994). Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film. London: British Film Institute. Harper, Sue (2006). Fragmentation and crisis: 1940s admissions figures at the Regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26 (3): 361–394. Higson, Andrew (1985). Five films. In: National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (ed. Geoff Hurd), 22–26. London: British Film Institute. Higson, Andrew (1995). Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, Andrew and Neale, Steve (1985). Afterword. In: National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (ed. Geoff Hurd), 73–76. London: British Film Institute. Hill, John (2006). Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London: British Film Institute. Lant, Antonia (1991). Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacKenzie, SP (2001). British War Films 1939–1945: The Cinema and the Services. London: Continuum. Manvell, Roger (1946). Film. rev. edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Manvell, Roger (1974). Films and the Second World War. London: J.M. Dent. Murphy, Robert (1989). Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1948. London: Routledge. Petley, Julian (1986). The lost continent. In: All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (ed. Charles Barr), 98–119. London: British Film Institute. Petrie, Duncan (2000). Screening Scotland. London: British Film Institute. Poole, Julian (1987). British cinema attendance in wartime: audience preference at the Majestic, Macclesfield, 1939–1946. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7 (1): 13–34. Powell, Michael (1986). A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann. Rhode, Eric (1976). A History of the Cinema from its Origins to 1970. London: Allen Lane. Richards, Jeffrey (1987). Wartime cinema audiences and the class system: the case of Ships with Wings 1941. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7 (2): 129–141. Richards, Jeffrey and Sheridan, Dorothy (eds.) (1987). Mass‐Observation at the Movies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rotha, Paul (1958). Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings about the Cinema. London: Faber and Faber. Rotha, Paul and Griffith, Richard (1967). The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema, 3e. London: Spring Books. Shearman, John (1946). Wartime wedding. Documentary News Letter 6 (54): 53. Street, Sarah and Dickinson, Margaret (1985). Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: British Film Institute. Taylor, Paul M (ed.) (1988). Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War. London: Macmillan. Winnington, Richard (1949). Drawn and Quartered: A Selection of Weekly Film Reviews and Drawings. London: The Saturn Press. Wright, Basil (1974). The Long View: A Personal Perspective on World Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg.

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The 1950s and 1960s Melanie Williams

Introduction There once seemed to be a fairly clear dividing line between ‘the 1950s’ and ‘the 1960s’ and what those two decades connoted, at least in vernacular historiography. The 1950s in Britain were black and white, defined by the hangover of war, and overwhelmingly an age of deference in spite of a few rumblings of youthful rebellion towards the end of the decade. Then the 1960s began in earnest around 1963 (as did ‘sexual intercourse’, according to Philip Larkin) and soon drab monochrome began to cede to kaleidoscopic colour, old hierarchies were overturned, and youthful innovation and daring made the country ‘swing’ like never before.1 If  one sought a microcosmic demonstration of the remarkable distance Britain seemed to travel over those years, one could scarcely do better than the biography of Keith Richards: from angelic boy chorister singing for Queen Elizabeth II to notoriously debauched guitarist for the most controversial of 1960s rock groups, The Rolling Stones (McMillan 2013, p. 23); a story of individual maturation, to be sure, but also powerfully symbolic of much wider cultural shifts in British society. Likewise, when looking at British cinema over those two decades and comparing a film from the beginning of the period like Ealing’s The Blue Lamp (1950) with one from its close like Performance (completed in 1968 but released in 1970, and starring Richards’ bandmate Mick Jagger), the social and cinematic gulf ­between them seems bewilderingly wide. When neurotic young hoodlum Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde) shoots PC George Dixon dead ( Jack Warner) in The Blue Lamp, an entire community, on both sides of the law, expresses its cohesive collective identity by ensuring the criminal’s entrapment. In Performance,

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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individual identity, never mind group identity, is utterly protean and provisional, the personae of Turner (Mick Jagger) and Chas ( James Fox) dangerously ­incoherent. These two British films seem not only to come from different decades but different planets, supporting the thesis that in the intervening years a true ‘cultural revolution’ (Marwick 1998) had indeed taken place, clearly discernible across a range of British art, music and media, including its cinema. However, like most neat and clear divisions, the sense of definitive break between the two decades becomes harder to sustain once it is examined in any detail. Periodisation is less decisive even in Arthur Marwick’s landmark historical work (1998) which has to posit a ‘long sixties’ stretching back into the 1950s and forwards into the mid‐1970s to take into full account how and when cultural change actually happened, or in Christopher Booker’s earlier post‐war history in which the 1950s and the 1960s are bracketed together as the period when a dangerous ‘neophilia’ took hold in British society (Brooker 1992). More recently, Dominic Sandbrook’s histories of the period (Sandbrook 2005, 2006) make a powerful case for understanding the two decades, in Britain at least, in terms of deeper cultural continuity rather than drastic change, observing that while perhaps half a million people might buy the biggest‐selling single of the week, four times that many would head off that weekend to the nearest river or canal for a spot of fishing … Britain in the age of affluence was a country as much of the old and the middle‐aged as it was of the young. (Sandbrook 2006, p. 146)

Even the pop charts were a more complex affair than one might suppose; at the height of 1967s’ Summer of Love, The Beatles’ double A‐side single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was kept from reaching number one by Engelbert Humperdinck’s more traditional ballad Please Release Me. Bearing in mind such historical quirks, Sandbrook seeks to go beyond the usual mythological touchstones for understanding this period, supplementing ‘Lady Chatterley, the Pill and the Rolling Stones’ with more ambiguous emblems of the age combining both residual and emergent elements, such as ‘bingo, Blackpool and Berni Inns’ (2006, p. xxiv). Mining their own memories, some commentators have gone even further in their iconoclasm and completely turned on its head the assumption that the 1950s meant stasis and the 1960s transformation. For Matthew Parris, reflecting on his post‐war boyhood, the reverse was true: The received wisdom about the period is wrong: that the fifties were dull, unoriginal, suburban, a sort of prim prelude to the Beatles. The era was the real turning point, when modernity arrived. The swinging sixties were merely flamboyant, a  ­g iggling reaction to the immense postwar social, moral and economic change which the fifties ushered in. The new world didn’t begin with the Magic Bus and ‘Yellow Submarine’ but with ‘Think Formica’, the Ford Zephyr, the Martini cocktail, suntans, crooning, the word ‘contemporary’ …. (Parris 2002, p. 13)

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From this jumble of personal and sometimes highly idiosyncratic recollections, there emerges a corrective counterpoint to the usual story of the 1950s and the 1960s. As reiterated by broadcaster Joan Bakewell, herself a key 1960s television personality, the 1950s have been ‘too often dumped into the bin of history as the so‐dull, so‐drab decade that sits glumly in the shadow of its younger sibling, the attention‐grabbing 60s’ (Bakewell 2006). However, the recent upsurge in British histories of the pre‐1960s post‐war period, including works by David Kynaston (2007, 2010, 2013) and Peter Hennessy (2006), provide evidence that the 1950s is retrospectively becoming at least as fascinating as the decade which followed it. Arguably, a similar revisionism has operated in recent scholarship on British cinema. The 1960s formed the focus of such foundational decade‐based studies as Alexander Walker’s Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (2005, first published 1974) and Robert Murphy’s Sixties British Cinema (1992) but for a long time, no equivalent studies focussed on the 1950s were published, probably for the basic reason that British film production during those years was seen as being of little interest or value; ‘like staring into a void’, as Geoff Brown put it (quoted in Geraghty 2000, p. 37). But in the early years of the new millennium came a glut of books looking at that devalued decade: Christine Geraghty’s British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (2000), Ian McKillop and Neil Sinyard’s edited collection British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (2003) and Sue Harper and Vincent Porter’s British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (2003). They appeared on the heels of a number of detailed studies of previously unfashionable British directors who enjoyed their heyday in the 1950s, including the filmmaking teams Dearden and Relph (Burton et al. 1997) and the Boulting brothers (Burton et al. 1999), and J. Lee Thompson (Chibnall 2000). Thus, a period of British filmmaking previously ‘stigmatised as conservative and dull’, indicative of ‘a “doldrums era”’ (Mackillop and Sinyard 2003, pp. 2–3) now began to be reconceptualised as intensely interesting, and profoundly entangled with the challenges of modernity. Harper and Porter invoke gladiatorial imagery to suggest the period’s hitherto unrecognised dynamism, describing the 1950s as a battleground in which different factions  –  in finance, in class politics, in gender ­representation, in technology – struggled for dominance. It was not a dull period … but a dynamic and often confusing period in which new and old methods and ­materials fought, often to the death. (Harper and Porter 2003, p. 2)

It has been a hallmark of this new historical work on British cinema that it has engaged very thoroughly with industrial and institutional contexts, galvanised by the broader growth of film history. Of course, there had been earlier works of film scholarship that had attempted to speak to the complexities of post‐war British cinema. An earlier outlier was Raymond Durgnat’s quicksilver study, A Mirror for England, which dared to



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s­ uggest, long before anyone else, that films from the era when Britain was navigating its way from austerity to affluence were actually worthy of critical interest. Showing an independence of thought that is still startling, Durgnat made a forceful case that it was ‘absurd to notice such Hollywood conformists as Hawks, McCarey and Walsh, yet deny equally high honours to, say, Roy Baker, Michael Powell and Terence Fisher’ (1971, p. 4). Working on a less auteurist tack, and much more influenced by Screen theory, John Hill’s Sex, Class and Realism (1986) examined the important transitional period 1956–1963 when British cinema began to re‐engage more thoroughly with social consciousness. Hill’s work is one of many to take a ‘look back in gender’ at the films made during these crucial post‐war decades, unearthing fascinating material around the changing and frequently paradoxical sexual politics of the period. This has been joined by subsequent studies of femininity and masculinity in British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s by Medhurst (1984, 1986), Geraghty (1986, 2000, 2009), Harper (2000), Spicer (2001), Bell (2009), and Williams (2009) among others. Other key scholarship on post‐war British cinema has concentrated on popular genre, with important work looking at war films (Chapman 1998; Murphy 2000), comedy (Porter 2001; Hunter and Porter 2012), horror (Hutchings 1993; Chibnall and Petley 2001), crime drama (Chibnall and Murphy 1999), and the pop film (Caine 2004; Glynn 2013). Building on that growing body of scholarship, the aim of this chapter is to trace some of the major developments in British cinema over the 20‐year period ­between The Blue Lamp’s image of cohesion and Performance’s image of fracture, not only looking at what was happening in film production at that time but also how British cinema 1950–1970 has been conceptualised and debated by critics, historians, and theorists, both at the time and in subsequent years, and what have been understood as its most important genres, cycles, and moments. The final section of the chapter will depart on a slightly different tack, taking a closer look at a particular setting and topic which was returned to recurrently throughout the 1950s and 1960s, straddling different genres and incorporating many different ideological allegiances: school. The school‐set film provides an ideal heuristic vehicle for exploring the variety of British film production over this period and for tracking changes in the ways in which fundamental ideas of class, tradition, power, gender, and youth were represented. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of ‘youthquake’ (Lewis 1978, p. 117), with the 1950s seeing the (supposed) birth of the teenager and the 1960s witnessing youth’s triumphant ascendancy as ultimate arbiters of cultural taste. A post‐war baby boom meant that young people were more numerous than ever before and, unsurprisingly, their education was a hotly contested topic. British films from this time mediated and contributed to these debates, voicing anxieties about youth or harking back to comforting ­certainties of the past or comic fantasy but also offering spaces for identification for young audiences – who were, after all, increasingly the cinema’s main group of paying customers.

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Key Trends of the 1950s and 1960s By 1950, cinemagoing in Britain had begun to decline from its immediate post‐war peak although annual admissions still numbered 1.4 billion (Harper and Porter 2003, p. 244) and therefore the cinema still constituted a major site of leisure and pleasure for large numbers of Britons. In the realm of British production, Ealing Studios were notably successful, not so much for their latterly celebrated highly distinctive comedies (and 1951 saw the release of two of the best: The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit) (Figure 5.1) but for realist dramas such as the aforementioned The Blue Lamp, the top film at the British box‐office in 1950, and the war film The Cruel Sea, a top box‐office hit of 1953. Of course, Ealing’s central place in British film history was consolidated by Charles Barr’s pioneering study of the studio, first written in 1976. In light of later revisionist scholarship, it is ­interesting to note that Barr’s chapter on Ealing’s output post‐1951 is entitled ‘­stagnation’, and he points to an increasingly moribund ethos that takes hold as the decade wears on, exemplified by the enclosed circular toy train track that appears in the credits of The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); a formerly dynamic company now ‘going round in circles, protected from the world outside’ (Barr 1998, p. 159).

Figure 5.1  Highly distinctive comedy: The Man in the White Suit (1951).



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Arguably the most successful ‘Ealing comedy’ of the 1950s, and another film fixated on antiquated transport, was not made by Ealing at all, but by Ealing personnel William Rose and Henry Cornelius working for the Rank Organisation employing (after the project had been rejected by Ealing’s Michael Balcon): the charming vintage car comedy Genevieve (1953). Its carefree middle‐class protagonists, played by John Gregson, Dinah Sheridan, Kenneth More, and Kay Kendall, exemplified the mid‐century ‘affluent cycle’ identified by Raymond Durgnat (1971, p. 44). Indeed, comedy dominated popular British cinema of the 1950s, as demonstrated by Rank’s Doctor in the House series (1954 onwards) featuring the beleaguered young medic Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde), or  –  positioned slightly differently in the social spectrum – the travails of Norman Wisdom’s Chaplinesque ‘little man’ from Trouble in Store (1954) onwards, also produced by Rank. Hugely popular with audiences, these various kinds of comedy have been slower to gain academic champions, although analyses by Geraghty (2000) and Dacre (2012) have pointed to some of their complexities. Later in the decade Anglo‐Amalgamated’s saucier Carry On films started to have an impact, with Carry On Nurse (1959) and Carry On Constable (1960) placed among the top box‐office attractions of their respective years. Disregarded at the time, this series has subsequently come to occupy an absolutely central place in British popular culture, and are seen as ­exemplary of specifically British comic traditions (Medhurst 2007). Comedy aside, the other genre to enjoy enormous success in the 1950s was the war film, with Second World War combat films and prisoner‐of‐war dramas ­dominating British screens. The Dam Busters (1955) and Reach for the Sky (1956) were even the biggest box‐office hits of their respective years, facing down much glossier competition from Hollywood (see Thumin 1991). Despite being accused of continually harping on past glories rather than facing contemporary reality by critics of the time William Whitebait and Lindsay Anderson (see Chapman 1998), the 1950s cycle of war films was nonetheless remarkably popular with audiences, perhaps due more to its therapeutic function than to outright jingoism. As Robert Murphy has suggested, giving the films a more sympathetic hearing retrospectively: It would be odd if a series of events as cataclysmic as the Second World War did not reverberate long after they were over. The danger, excitement, sadness, death and horror of the war had either to be deeply repressed or to find appropriate ­outlets. (2000, p. 235)

The Rank Organisation, along with the Associated British Picture Corporation, bestrode the British cinema landscape like a colossus in the 1950s, dominating not only film production but also exhibition (Macnab 1993), and that duopoly held fast into the 1960s. But by the end of the 1950s, the decline in annual cinema admissions had moved from slight to precipitous, dropping to 515 million. As numerous

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historians have pointed out, the reasons for this were complex and various. Certainly, the growth of television ownership, spurred on by the advent of commercial television in 1955 as much as the more‐commonly cited impact of the televised Coronation in 1953, played a vital role. But so too did ‘increased home ownership, the growth of Do‐It‐Yourself, the advent of central heating’ as well as greater availability of motor vehicles and other lifestyle‐enhancing consumer goods which ‘all meant that, for many, real life started to become as enjoyable as that on the screen’ (Harper and Porter 2003, p. 244). Films had to compete for attention against many other vibrant forms of popular culture: it is indicative of the broader changes in popular taste and leisure that by the late 1950s the long‐ running film magazine Picturegoer had merged with the pop‐focused Disc Mirror and by 1960 had been completely usurped by its pop partner and ceased ­publication altogether. However, even if cinema‐going had ceased to be as widespread as it once was, let alone the ‘essential social habit of the age’ it had been designated by J.B. Priestley in the 1930s, the cinema still carried considerable importance as a barometer of the times. Significant changes in censorship were taking place across a range of media in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Lady Chatterley trial  –  in which D.H. Lawrence’s novel was absolved of charges of obscenity – and the relaxation of the Lord Chamberlain’s prohibitive powers over theatre were matched by the enlightened tenure (or so it seemed if he was on your side) of John Trevelyan as Head of the Board of British Film Censors from 1958 to 1971 (Aldgate 1995). Under his jurisdiction, the X certificate (first introduced in 1951) was self‐­ consciously ‘rehabilitated’ for critical respectability, with films such as Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) hailed for their sexual and social candour and for ushering in a ‘New Wave’ of British film realism. But despite being designated a breakthrough in many quarters (including Sight and Sound under Penelope Houston’s aegis), the British New Wave was decried in equal measure by others, most notably the influential young auteurist critics at the British magazine Movie. They baldly stated in their opening issue that there was ‘as much genuine personality in Room at the Top, method in A Kind of Loving and style in A Taste of Honey as there is wit in An Alligator Named Daisy, intelligence in Above Us the Waves and ambition in Ramsbottom Rides Again’, invoking the typical ­products of the middle‐to‐low‐brow mainstream of British film as a deliberately unflattering point of comparison for the films of the New Wave, before concluding that ‘the British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive’ (Movie ­editorial collective 1962, p. 3). Subsequent critics have also suggested that the New  Wave’s status as breakthrough should be modified by an awareness of its often ­retrograde or downright misogynist sexual politics (Hill 1986), conservative ­aesthetics (Higson 1984) and a recognition that other British films that came before or alongside the New Wave may have exhibited just as much of a sense of social concern or critique (Medhurst 1984; Hutchings 2009; Williams 2012). In fact, one of the most important generic developments in British cinema of the late 1950s



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arguably lay not in social realism but in fantasy, in the shape of Hammer’s reinvigoration of the horror genre. In colour rather than black and white, Hammer’s Gothic horrors such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958) used historical and literary frameworks as vehicles for exploring the fascinations of sadism, violence, and ‘monstrous or deviant sexuality’ (Conrich 2009, p. 100). In response to Julian Petley’s highly influential request for an exploration of the ‘lost continent’ of British cinema – all those modes of filmmaking that elude a realist orthodoxy and instead form ‘an other, repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving the length and breadth of that cinema’ (1986, p. 98) – one of the most productive cartographic expeditions has been into horror territory, particularly its high‐water mark of the 1950s and 1960s (Hutchings 1993; Pirie 2007). Despite frequent excoriation from the critics as purveyors of lowest‐ common‐denominator schlock, Hammer would go on to win the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1968; their financial clout in exports finally outpacing any concerns about their lack of respectability. ‘Runaway’ productions, US‐financed but taking advantage of tax breaks offered by filming overseas, were a distinctive feature of the landscape of 1950s British film, with colour spectaculars from Ivanhoe (1952) to The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) enjoying international box‐office success. Entering the 1960s, British cinema’s internationalism became even more central to its identity and economic base, as indicated by the title of Alexander Walker’s book on the period, Hollywood England. One of the American studios central to this new dynamic were United Artists. They backed the James Bond series of films produced by Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli which started with Dr No (1962), incubating an ongoing franchise which still defines British cinema’s global identity today and has been subject to numerous critical appraisals (Bennett and Woollacott 1987; Chapman 2007; Lindner 2013). The rise of Bond marked a generic shift too, which saw the previously strong British war film go into retreat as tales of Cold War espionage gained greater prominence, whether these were exotic and glamorous as with the Bond series or more downbeat in their take on realpolitik, as with Harry Palmer as a kind of anti‐Bond in The Ipcress File (1965) or gloomy Le Carré adaptations such as The Deadly Affair (1966). The Bond films were also important in making a star of Sean Connery, one of a number of British actors of proletarian origins who came to global prominence during the 1960s. Another was Albert Finney, the rowdy lad of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning who then became the titular hero of Tom Jones (1963), a highly irreverent literary adaptation. Although very different in source material, style, and setting, the Bond films, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Tom Jones all capitalised on British cinema’s growing reputation for sexual frankness; although it’s worth noting that any liberation in that area seemed to work mainly to the benefit of male sexual adventurers. Carrie Tarr’s perceptive subtitle in her article on two female‐centred British films, Sapphire (1959) and Darling (1965), suggests how women’s sexual lives were contained within narrow ‘boundaries of permitted

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pleasure’ (Tarr 1985), both on screen and off it. No wonder the narrative trope of unintended pregnancy haunts films of this period. Ever at the vanguard, United Artists also supported production on The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), first of a three‐picture deal for the group brokered by producer Walter Shenson. Shot inexpensively but highly inventively by Richard Lester, it managed to both encapsulate, critique, and (ironically) commodify Beatlemania just as the group were spearheading the ‘British invasion’ that would dominate American pop music for a sizeable proportion of the 1960s. But despite their musical pre‐eminence, it was not any of the Beatles’ films but Twentieth Century Fox’s musical The Sound of Music (1965) which attained the status of the most popular film of the 1960s, both in the US and the UK. Echoing Sandbrook’s point about the co‐mingling of tradition and innovation in 1960s culture, the film’s British star Julie Andrews should be remembered as just as much a ‘face of the sixties’ as her cooler contemporaries Julie Christie or Rita Tushingham. Another important cinema trend, again facilitated by American money, was the mid‐1960s cycle of ‘swinging London’ films, responding to the idea of England’s capital city as a uniquely creative and special place. Fallen upon gratefully by a Hollywood studio system increasingly in freefall (despite monumental one‐off blockbusters like The Sound of Music) and desperate to tap into whatever money‐ making zeitgeist there was going, swinging London promised ‘a dazzling blur of op and pop … pulsing with half a dozen separate veins of excitement’, to cite Time’s infamous editorial of 1966 (quoted in Murphy 1992, p. 139). But strangely, as Robert Murphy points out, it’s near impossible to find anything like an outright celebration of London’s social and sexual possibilities in British cinema: films like The Knack (1965), Darling (1965), Alfie (1966) and Georgy Girl (1966) all took a more muted, contemplative or neo‐traditionalist turn in their approach to what constituted meaningful human interaction. Likewise, the perspectives offered on swinging London by European auteurs Roman Polanski and Michelangelo Antonioni in Repulsion (1965) and Blow‐Up (1967) respectively offered alienation and anomie rather than excitement and energy. Formerly dismissed as the worst excrescences of British cinema’s history, Murphy’s defence of many of the ‘swinging London’ films as ‘extravagant, stylish, experimental’ (1992, p. 277) has been crucial in rehabilitating the decade’s cinema, particularly in DVD publishing: the BFI’s Flipside imprint has made available a number of films, such as Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and Joanna, first championed in his work. Usually characterised in terms of modishness, the centrality of period drama to British cinema of the 1960s is one of its lesser‐acknowledged tendencies – although of course, as with the Beatles’ faux‐Edwardian Sergeant Pepper concept, a return to the past could be the very height of fashion. Columbia backed a stately film of A Man for All Seasons (1967) and a jolly Oliver! (1968), while other studios supported literary adaptations such as Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and Women in Love (1969). Military conflicts of the past were returned to in Lawrence of Arabia (1962),



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Zulu (1964), Khartoum (1966), and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). And among the most successful Carry Ons of the decade were the costume parodies Carry on Cleo (1964) and Carry On Up the Khyber (1968), the latter featuring its unforgettable denouement of the British Raj retaining absolute sangfroid under attack, even while the walls crumble around them and the celling falls in, even unto the point of absurdity – probably the scene that earned the film its place in the BFI’s 1999 poll of the 100 best British films, a critical benediction that would have been unthinkable at the time of its original release. But perhaps the most profound comments on post‐war British identity could only be voiced stealthily through the twin distanciations of a historical setting and low comedy. The threat that television began to pose to cinema in the 1950s came to pass fully in the 1960s. As economist Terence Kelly outlined in 1966, plummeting cinema admissions meant the closure of cinemas and an inexorable downward spiral: ‘fewer jobs for cinema workers; less money flows back through the industry; eventually less is available for reinvestment in new films’ (Kelly et al. 1966, p. 16). Moreover, a model of British filmmaking funded almost entirely on Hollywood money could not be a sustainable one. By the decade’s end, up to 90% of British productions were US‐financed and, as Sarah Street points out, while ‘it was gratifying to see Britain as a magnet for overseas investment’ (Street 2002, p. 170), this over‐reliance on the dollar presented self‐evident dangers. With the advent of lower‐budget but profit‐generating youth films originating from Hollywood itself in the latter years of the 1960s – starting with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – it seemed that Britain was no longer the zeitgeist‐harnessing location of a few years ago. That, and a pattern of economic retrenchment among the major studios which had fatally overextended themselves on unsuccessful big‐budget spectaculars, meant a bleak prognosis for British cinema. By 1970, Walter Shenson, the man who made The Beatles into film stars as well as pop stars, offered his verdict on the bursting of the bubble: ‘It is a low profile country now … For an American, it is impossible to make a film reflecting the British scene – there just is no scene today … all that is left is a hangover’ (quoted in Walker 2005, p. 451). Indeed, the films made by Shenson’s protégés seemed to track the broader trends of the decade: from the black‐and‐white cinema‐verité influenced laddish larks of A Hard Day’s Night, to the Wilkie Collins‐meets‐comic book colour kitsch not quite disguising underlying anguish of Help! (1965), to the made‐for‐TV but wilfully amateurish psychedelia Magical Mystery Tour (1967), the contractual obligation imaginatively fulfilled by way of animation in Yellow Submarine (1968), and finally the intimate documentary Let It Be (1970), offering a glimpse into the group’s implosion as they recorded their final album. Ebullience sliding into dissipation, synergy becoming dissent: the break‐up of the emblematic 1960s band seemed to speak of much wider cultural changes, including the shift in British cinema from apparent boom to undeniable bust. By 1970, the dream was over; as George Harrison’s solo album of that year announced, ‘All Things Must Pass’.

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Back to School: An Alternative Route Through Post‐war British Cinema School has been a perennially popular setting for British films, providing a source for both conflict and comedy, and this is no less true of the 1950s and the 1960s. Tracking the varied treatments of school life that British filmmakers created over these two decades offers an alternative pathway through post‐war British film ­history which can yield new insights on the acknowledged landmarks while also illuminating less familiar areas across a broad range of generic traditions. It is hardly surprising that education was a topic of great interest during these decades, given the major legislative and organisational changes which took place, from the implementation of the 11‐Plus examination which syphoned off some working‐ class children into grammar school but consigned the majority to under‐resourced secondary moderns, to the widespread introduction of non‐selective comprehensive schools post‐1965. However, the boarding school figured most extensively in British films of the 1950s, above and beyond any other kind of educational establishment, unsurprisingly given its prominence across popular culture, especially books and comics. Renown’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951) adapted one of the ur‐texts of British public school mythology, Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel, and ­followed the hero’s progress through sadistic initiation to eventual triumph. The film’s positive representation of boarding school life corresponded with a deeply embedded respect for educational tradition within British culture; hence the outcry in the following year that greeted the posthumous publication of George Orwell’s seditious essay about his own bleak, brutalised schooldays in similar institutions, ‘Such, such were the joys’: ‘A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien underwater world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination’ (Orwell 1970 [orig. 1952], p. 419).2 Although some distance removed from Orwell’s level of critique, the Anthony Asquith and Terence Rattigan collaboration The Browning Version (1951) also de‐romanticised the public school environment. For the downtrodden Classics master Crocker‐Harris (Michael Redgrave), it is the site of his abject humiliation and misery as he endures his wife’s infidelity and his professional marginalisation. The sequence in which Redgrave breaks down in tears upon receipt of one kindly pupil’s gift of a book is justly celebrated as a fine instance not only of British screen acting but also that particular emotional tradition of trying to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ and what occurs when that carefully maintained carapace suddenly cracks open under pressure. As Richard Dyer points out in his study of an earlier British film navigating similar emotional territory, Brief Encounter (1945): ‘Such restraint is not the absence of feeling. Indeed, there can be no concept of restraint without an acknowledgment of feeling – restraint must keep something emotional in check’ (Dyer 1993, p. 66). Revisionist scholarship like Dyer’s in both theatre and film studies has been crucial in the rehabilitation of



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Terence Rattigan’s reputation (Rebellato 1999), going beyond a dramatic geography defined by the macho Look Back in Anger (1956) to reinstate the value of powerfully affective work in a more reticent register. When it came to depicting school life in 1950s British cinema, comedy was a far more common generic pathway than tragedy and comedic forays back to school provided some of its major successes. After The Blue Lamp, 1950’s second biggest box‐office attraction was The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950). Made by Launder and Gilliat’s Independent Pictures, it shares with the contemporaneous Ealing comedies an emphasis on the eccentric and the whimsical and two of its stars, Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford. They play headteachers of two single‐sex schools forced to share premises due to an administrative error, who then have to cover up the fact to visiting governors and parents. The subterfuge fails, of course, and ‘gender and class separatism’ collapse in what Sarah Street describes as ‘the chaotic spectacle of collision: screaming, fighting boys and girls on the games field’ (Street 1997, p. 77). The larky, mildly satirical tone continued in Launder and Gilliat’s subsequent series of St Trinian’s films which began in 1954. Alongside BBC Television’s popular adaptation of Frank Richards’s Greyfriars Billy Bunter stories (1952–1961) and sitcom Whack‐O! (1956–1960), the Jennings and Molesworth series (starting 1950 and 1953 respectively), Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s cartoons and the films inspired by them testified to the buoyancy of boarding school comedy in the 1950s. But the difference of gender was crucial to St Trinian’s and much of the humour of Searle’s original drawings and the subsequent films derived from the incongruity of young ladies behaving in such a brutal and unladylike fashion (some of their more sadistic tendencies were inspired by Searle’s suffering as a prisoner‐ of‐war of the Japanese). Contrary to their rather anodyne depiction in many other areas of 1950s popular culture, the girls of St Trinian’s were not only permitted to be wild and unruly but were actively celebrated for their bad behaviour. But of course the schoolgirls, whether sexy sixth formers or diabolical fourth formers, were only part of the attraction. The original St Trinian’s series – Belles in 1954, Blue Murder in 1957, Pure Hell in 1960 and Train Robbery in 1966 – also benefitted from the performative skills of a whole roster of character actors such as Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Richard Wattis, Dennis Price, and others, all of whom played an integral role in constituting the highly distinctive ‘structure of feeling’ of postwar British comedy, simultaneously cosy and down‐at‐heel. The public schools in most of these comedies have seen better days, and the comic plots of both The Belles of St Trinian’s and the Whack‐O! spin‐off, Bottoms Up (1959), hinge on the possible riches supplied by wealthy Middle‐Eastern pupils which could help solve each school’s cashflow problem. If, as Sarah Street suggests, institutional comedies offer ‘microcosms of British society as a whole’ (Street 1997, p. 76), then the image of the nation presented in these comedies – a seedy second‐rate boarding school dependent on largesse from overseas – is far from flattering. A more ingratiating national self‐image, typical of the Durgnatian ‘affluent cycle’, could be found in the co‐ed state grammar school of It’s Great to Be Young! (1956),

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an  ABPC musical comedy starring John Mills and Cecil Parker as pedagogic ­antagonists alongside a cast of jazz‐loving teens.3 The authorship of Ted Willis – co‐creator of the figurehead of post‐war British consensus, P.C. Dixon of Dock Green, but also early adopter of ‘kitchen sink’ realism with dramas such as Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) – may account for some of the strange unevenness in the film’s tone. It seems caught between relishing the militancy of the students’ strike and escalating defiance (the look of the scenes in which pupils scale the roof to smoke bomb the school hierarchy during assembly seem to pre‐empt If….) and retaining space for the previously authoritarian Headmaster to meet the protesters halfway and be seen to be reasonable. A self‐contradictory hotchpotch, It’s Great to Be Young! also proved very popular, to the bemusement of film critic Isabel Quigly who admitted she ‘found the kids of Angel Hill Grammar School quite nauseating’ (quoted in Hill 1986, p. 185). A particularly telling moment from the film also suggests how school representations crystallise much broader tendencies in British cinema. The deputy head’s speech introducing the new Headmaster makes use of extensive naval metaphors (‘a new man at the helm’, ‘a new face on the bridge’) prompting one kid to whisper ‘He’s making me seasick.’ It seems that the helming of school and battleship are interchangeable, and if school can be run along military lines, so too can the military sometimes resemble a school. Following this logic, the ‘school film’ goes far beyond films explicitly set in educational environments and, as Andrew Roberts observes, encompasses many British war films of the period: ‘From horseplay  – “Come on chaps, off with their trousers!” in The Dam Busters – to reticence in the face of danger, the sporting and social ethos of the public schools permeated the screen’ (2007, p. 46). Given Britain’s interlocking military‐educational complex, it is interesting to note that the schoolboy in It’s Great to Be Young! rejects that appeal of a captain to his cadets on the grounds of nausea, and trad jazz and activism prove more appealing for this young proto‐ rebel of 1956. Even in the most ostensibly bland films, there are signs of the broader dissent changing British culture. Given their penchant for institutional comedy, it was only a matter of time before Anglo‐Amalgamated’s Carry On series would turn to school as a setting in Carry On Teacher (1959). Borrowing both from Carry On Sergeant (1958) and Happiest Days of Your Life, the film hinges on an official inspection which is magically and comically manipulated. The trickery is essentially benign, its purpose to prevent the beloved headmaster (Ted Ray) from leaving by making him effectively unemployable anywhere else. More significantly, the setting is state school rather than private, co‐educational rather than single sex, and there is even space in Norman Hudis’s script for some intelligent rumination on the flaws of corporal punishment (‘Extraordinary theory, you bend a child double in order to give it an upright character’) and on the battle between traditional and progressive pedagogies, the latter exemplified by Leslie Phillips’s visiting child psychologist, who espouses free expression. Although the broad humour and innuendo are present and correct



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( Joan Sims’s Miss Allcock splits her gym shorts while exercising too vigorously, for example), Carry On Teacher is one of the few school comedies of the period to demonstrate at least some engagement with the highly charged debates about secondary education that were ongoing at the time. In completely different generic vein, the MGM British sci‐fi horror Village of the Damned (1960), based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, culminates in a memorable scene of classroom conflict between the preternaturally gifted alien children and their teacher George Sanders as they attempt to read his mind. The film uses fantasy as a means of extrapolating an underlying ambivalence towards children, and more specifically the latent power of the large post‐war baby boom generation and what would happen if they turned on their ‘parents’. In Village of the Damned, consensus is not an option and the alien interlopers have to be destroyed; rarely has generational conflict been presented in such directly diagrammatic form. Joseph Losey’s similarly titled The Damned (1963) offered another instance of ‘edu‐horror’ but this time much more sympathetic to the abused children who have been irradiated and imprisoned in a state‐sanctioned experiment, their only connection to the outside world being a television monitor at the head of the classroom. Moving into the territory of the New Wave, it is interesting to note that none of its canonical films are set in school, although Jo in A Taste of Honey (1961) is briefly shown enduring boring lessons while borstal features as an alternative educational institution in The Loneliness of the Long‐Distance Runner (1962).4 However, if we follow Peter Hutchings’ recommendation to go ‘beyond the New Wave’ (2009) into the broader reaches of contemporaneous realist‐inflected British cinema, a different picture emerges and we find several films which are set in and around schools (see also Hill 1986, on the ‘social problem film’). However, in each one, the primary focus rests not with the pupils but with the dilemmas faced by their teachers. Spare the Rod (1961) chronicles the experiences of young teacher John Saunders (Max Bygraves) who takes up a post in a deprived East End school and who finds himself clashing with his superiors over the issue of appropriate discipline. A minor aspect of Spare the Rod, a teenage schoolgirl’s attempt to seduce her teacher, becomes the central focus of another school‐set film, Term of Trial (1962). Made by Romulus, the company behind the breakthrough film Room at the Top, and once again casting Simone Signoret as a dissatisfied Frenchwoman trapped in dingy Britain, Term of Trial is one of those films analogous to but not fully embedded in the British New Wave canon. Broadly dismissed by both Walker and Murphy in their 1960s surveys, it deserves further attention, not least for the striking writing and direction of Peter Glenville, as well as a star performance from Laurence Olivier, appearing in his New Wave film after having played Archie Rice in The Entertainer (1960). Olivier plays middle‐aged alcoholic teacher Graham Weir, unhappily married (to Signoret’s character) and professionally stymied. Not unlike Crocker‐Harris in The Browning Version, Weir is touched by the affection shown by one of his pupils, but the fondness of 15‐year‐old Shirley Taylor (Sarah Miles) for

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her sympathetic teacher has a much more obviously sexual dimension and her schoolgirl crush culminates in an attempted seduction during a school trip to Paris – while a thunderstorm rages outside. One poster tagline presents Shirley lasciviously as straightforward femme fatale (‘Blonde, blonde hair. Soft, soft skin. Sixteen years old and a picture of innocence … waiting to destroy a man!’) but the situation presented in the film is altogether more complex. Weir encourages Shirley’s advances, perhaps inadvertently but then again perhaps not, enjoying the flattery of an attractive young woman’s attention. On the night she comes to his room, his rejection seems to teeter on the edge of near‐acceptance for a protracted period of time. Some of the action is even partially redacted by the blinding white flashes of lightning flooding the room, making the presentation of what actually occurs even more ambiguous – to what extent does Weir reciprocate Shirley’s kiss before he rebuffs her? When falsely accused of sexual assault by his hurt and humiliated pupil, the teacher insists on the purity of his motives: ‘What I felt for her, was the love of an unworthy man for a quality – innocence, tenderness, love – the thing God gives us before the filth of the world begins to cover it up.’ But he may be protesting too vehemently. The twist in the tale – that despite being acquitted, he has to tell his wife that he actually did have sex with the teenager because the truth of his sexual restraint is less palatable to her than the lie of his infidelity – can be read as an ironic indictment of a society which refuses to accept genuine ­innocence; in order to operate within its rules, Weir must pretend that he has succumbed. Or his admission of guilt might equally be seen as a true confession of repressed desire, an expression of his underlying wish that he had taken advantage of Shirley when he had the opportunity but merely lacked the courage to do so. Graham Weir’s courtroom speech can function simultaneously as the authentic cri de cœur of a good man against a wicked world and as the self‐deluding cant of a repressed sexual hypocrite. The intricate layers of performativity in Olivier’s playing of the scene, including moments of (intentional?) slight hamminess, renders possible either – or perhaps more accurate to say both – interpretations of a character who represents the ambivalent response of an older generation towards the nascent ‘permissive society’. The most commercially profitable of the ‘teacher at a rough school’ narratives came a few years later and was financed with Hollywood money: Columbia’s To Sir, With Love (1966). It grossed $19.1 million, and enjoyed particular success in the US, where its theme song also provided a number one hit for Lulu. In fact, so unexpected was the scale of the film’s success that Columbia conducted market research to find out why people had gone to see it (Walker 2005, p. 448). As Sarah Street observes, it proved that ‘success in America did not necessarily depend on lavish historical settings or action‐adventure thrills’ (Street 2002, p. 191) or the allure of ‘swinging London’; To Sir, With Love’s London is the begrimed, deprived East End rather than the King’s Road or Carnaby Street. But despite being popular with audiences, its story of an inspirational teacher winning the respect of his surly pupils met with much less critical favour, with John Russell Taylor’s dismissal



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of its ‘old‐fashioned sentimental nonsense’ (quoted in Hill 1986, p. 222) being ­typical of the response. But this disdain seems a little too simplistic and glib. Notwithstanding the scene in which Lulu sings her song and the reformed youngsters offer their teacher Mr. Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) a gift, there is much else in the film which is more astringent in tone. Thackeray’s conflict with his class comes to a head when one of the girls leaves a sanitary towel burning in the classroom fireplace as a prank, spurring the teacher into an enraged speech forging subtle intersectional links between class and race, emphasising the importance of refuting stereotypical assumptions of animalism foist upon certain social groups. In this context, his insistence on everyone behaving like ladies and gentlemen carries a rebellious charge. To Sir, With Love’s refusal to place racial tension centre stage could be seen as evasive but might equally be seen as liberating in its recognition that this is only one of several issues at play in this London community. And, finally, the hint that Pamela’s ( Judy Geeson) crush on her teacher may be partially reciprocated is alluded to delicately through mutual looks held a little longer than they should be, British cinema’s lingua franca of repressed desire. It is too easy to dismiss the film for its alleged ‘facile optimism’ (review quoted in Hill 1986, p. 221) in light of its happy ending but to do so neglects the film’s preceding moments of ambivalence about Thackeray’s mission and the underrated degree of subtlety it shows as a whole in dealing with what education is about and for. The final years of the 1960s offered a number of memorable school films. If…. (1968) returned to the public school but took a very different narrative route from earlier comedies of scholarly insubordination such as The Belles of St Trinian’s and Bottoms Up! in which one boy even proclaims ‘We’ll have a revolution!’. The vital difference in If…., as its assistant director Stephen Frears put it (in his 1995 ­documentary on British cinema, Typically British), was that in the 1968 film, they actually got out the guns and ‘shot the headmaster’. As its Kipling‐referencing title suggests, If…. takes all the empire‐building, man‐making, nation‐forging mythology surrounding public school education and repudiates it in the most violent terms, while understanding the beauties as well as the horrors of the system as only former inmates like Anderson and writer David Sherwin possibly could; the film was even shot at Anderson’s alma mater, Cheltenham College. As has often been observed, If…. chimed perfectly with the ethos of 1968, when, as Jeff Nuttall put it, across the world ‘young people under various pretexts made war on their elders, and their elders made war on them’ (quoted in Murphy 1992, p. 156). But the violence of the film is deliberately slow‐burning, deferring the scenes that have become its defining images: Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), ‘The Girl’ (Christine Noonan), and fellow guerrillas up on the school roof, opening fire on their masters and other assembled dignitaries on Founder’s Day. The school functioned for Anderson, as it had for many other British filmmakers, as ‘a microcosm … the educational system is such an exact image of the social system’ (quoted in Sutton 2005, p. 44) but his approach was a far cry from the gentle institutional lampooning of the 1950s comedies. Rather it was a fever dream of violent

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Figure 5.2  ‘The ethos of 1968’: Lindsay Anderson’s If….

revolution: the final return to the word ‘If ’ at the end of the film feels like an incitement to see what would happen if the supposition became reality, perfect for the inflammatory mood of 1968 (Figure 5.2). Even taking into account Christine Noonan’s ‘girl’ in If…., the focus in Anderson’s film is overwhelmingly homosocial. It falls to another film of the period to examine the psychosexual dynamics of girls’ education: Ronald Neame’s adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Although in some respects, it is a defiantly old‐fashioned film, a period drama set in the 1930s, directed by a British cinema veteran, its story is also timely for the late 1960s. Pupil revolts against teacher, with Sandy (Pamela Franklin) ‘putting a stop to’ her charismatic demagogue of a tutor, Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith). Initially, Brodie comes across as impressively independent, insisting that she is in her social and sexual ‘prime’, pinning a glorious Giotto reproduction over the uninspiring classroom portrait of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But Brodie’s supposed espousal of education as ‘a leading out of what is already there’ is the antithesis of how she actually operates, as proven by her fascist sympathies and the dangerous influence she exerts upon impressionable pupils.5 However, the flow of sympathies in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are far from straightforward and for all her flaws and delusions, Jean is still presented as a pioneer and a life force, making her ‘assassination’ by her protégée, Sandy, a pyrrhic victory. And the teacher may enjoy the ultimate triumph anyway as Jean’s words echo over Sandy’s final departure from school: ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.’ A wonderful showcase for a range of great female performances, this somewhat unfashionable film merits serious attention alongside the more obviously radical and masculine If….



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Shifting the emphasis away from the public schools of If…. or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie back to a far more common educational experience, Ken Loach, Barry Hines, and Tony Garnett’s Kes (1969) is a landmark of British cinema. Unlike Term of Trial or To Sir, With Love its dead‐end school is presented not through the subjectivity of a teacher but through the perspective of one of its disenfranchised pupils, Billy Casper (David Bradley). Billy’s latent capacity for meaningful education is ironically realised just a few months before he leaves formal education for good, and moreover it comes about through a process of pure autodidacticism, of training himself to train a kestrel. School has done nothing for Billy but ignore or chastise him; the Headmaster accuses his pupils of being unable to listen but he himself thoughtlessly canes one little boy who has only come to relay a message precisely because he refuses to listen. Kes makes plain that one sympathetic teacher (like Colin Welland’s Mr. Farthing) is never enough and Billy’s destiny is inevitable within an educational system which merely readies its working‐class pupils for poorly paid, unrewarding, manual labour. The ending of Kes, in which Billy’s cherished kestrel is killed by his brother and left in the dustbin before Billy takes it away for silent burial, is one of the most devastating and painful in all of British cinema, rich in metaphorical resonance about thwarted aspiration and educational failure. But somewhat ironically, its rhetorical power in invoking the death of a dream also marks a rebirth for British film: the taking flight of a new cinema of bold social critique drawing on the New Wave’s legacy (with Kes released under Tony Richardson’s Woodfall imprimatur, albeit mainly for reasons of financial expediency) and enriched by the inventiveness of socially‐engaged 1960s television drama, the training ground for both Loach and Garnett. The influence of television on a film like Kes is particularly significant since the newer medium was, by the close of the decade, firmly enshrined as the new ‘essential social habit of the age’. Although Kes, If…. and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie were all theatrically released films supported with US backing – from United Artists, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox respectively – in a few years’ time, that route would be far less readily available for British films, making Hollywood exile or cross‐migration into television the most viable way of being able to tell stories on film. Television taking over from film as the dominant audio‐visual medium was only one of countless major social and cultural transformations that took place between the years 1950 and 1970. British cinema underwent an irrevocable transformation over that period too, as can be traced through a survey of its widely varying treatments of school life from the consensus comedies that dominated the 1950s to the outright social protests that appeared towards the end of the 1960s. But it is equally important to register the aspects of cultural life in which social change is less readily apparent. The same years in which Kes and If…. played in cinemas with considerable commercial success  –  and MGM had a flop with their misconceived musical remake of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969) – a representation of school life with arguably much greater cultural purchase was London

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Weekend Television’s sitcom Please Sir! (1968–1972) which generated its own film spin‐off in 1971. Its writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey transplanted the scholastic high jinks familiar from countless British films stretching back to the 1930s into the contemporary world of the secondary modern school, successfully fusing residual and emergent cultural elements in the same way that the British comedy films had been able to achieve 15 or 20 years before. But by the close of the 1960s, things had changed, the baton of greater cultural relevance and demographic reach had been passed on, and British cinema would never be quite the same again. No doubt that is why the 1950s and the 1960s have been and continue to be revisited by scholars of British film.

Notes 1 See, for example, Jenny Diski’s evocative comparison: The Fifties are often characterised by a lack of colour. Like most of the movies, they were, everyone agrees, in black and white. In memory, the streets, the clothes, the prospects of the Fifties were in shades of grey … The middle Sixties was that moment when Dorothy stepped through her front door, out of Kansas, on the undreamed‐of yellowness of the brick road on the way to the Emerald City, and the heart burst with pleasure at the sudden busting out of a full‐blown Technicolor world. (Diski 2010, pp. 26–27)

2 Interesting how this metaphor suggests deafness and of course one of the most notable films of the 1950s to engage with education is Mandy (1952), in which the little girl with hearing impairment is brought out of isolation and into connection with the surrounding world through the imaginative and intensive teaching offered at the specialist school run by Dick Searle ( Jack Hawkins). It’s one of the few entirely positive depictions of a boarding school from this period, and even then Mandy is not a full boarder but a day pupil, for which she has to have special dispensation. 3 It’s Great to Be Young! is one of the few British films with a grammar school setting and it is interesting that the experience of the working‐class grammar school scholarship boy, such a recurrent trope in the literature, drama, and sociology of the period, figures far less prominently in British cinema. Jamie in the sex comedy, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), appears to have this provenance, as does Harry in the university drama, The Wild and the Willing (1962), but its most explicit expression is in Billy Liar (1963) with the protagonist’s angry recollection of being made to feel ‘grateful’ for his educational opportunities. The figure of the grammar school girl is even more marginal but does figure centrally in the exploitation drama The Yellow Teddybears (1963). 4 Free Cinema, the experimental documentary movement which preceded and led to the New Wave, showed rather more of a direct interest in children, documenting their games, both benign and sinister, in The Singing Street (1952) and Together (1956) and exploring the work of a school for the deaf in Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton’s Thursday’s Children (1954).



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5 The film provides an interesting companion piece to screenwriter Jay Presson Allen’s later exploration of an imperceptible slide towards fascism, Cabaret (1972).

References Aldgate, Anthony (1995). Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema and Theatre, 1955–1965. Oxford: Clarendon. Bakewell, Joan. (2005) ‘Neurotic but nice’. (Review). Guardian (28 October), p. 10. Barr, Charles (1998). Ealing Studios. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bell, Melanie (2009). Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet (1987). Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brooker, Christopher (2005). The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties. London: Pimlico. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim, and Wells, Paul (eds.) (1997). Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim, and Wells, Paul (eds.) (1999). The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks. Caine, Andrew (2004). Interpreting Rock Movies: The Pop Film and Its Critics in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chapman, James (1998). Our Finest Hour revisited: the Second World War in British feature films since 1945. Journal of Popular British Cinema 1: 63–75. Chapman, James (2007). Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, 2e. London: I.B. Tauris. Chibnall, Steve (2000). J. Lee Thompson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1999). British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge. Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (eds.) (2001). British Horror Cinema. London: Routledge. Conrich, Ian (2009). Traditions of the British horror film. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 96–105. London: British Film Institute. Dacre, Richard (2012). Norman Wisdom: Rank Studios and the rise of the super chump. In: British Comedy Cinema (ed. IQ Hunter and Laraine Porter), 128–140. London: Routledge. Diski, Jenny (2005). The Sixties. London: Profile. Durgnat, Raymond (1971). A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. London: Faber. Dyer, Richard (1993). Brief Encounter. London: British Film Institute. Geraghty, Christine (1986). Diana Dors. In: All Our Yesterdays (ed. Charles Barr), 341–345. London: British Film Institute. Geraghty, Christine (2005). British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look”. London: Routledge. Geraghty, Christine (2009). Women and 60s British cinema: the development of the “Darling” girl. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 313–320. London: British Film Institute. Glynn, Stephen (2013). The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond. London: Palgrave.

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Harper, Sue (2000). Women in British Cinema. London: Continuum. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2003). British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hennessy, Peter (2005). Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin. Higson, Andrew (1984). Space, place, spectacle. Screen 25 (4–5): 2–21. Hill, John (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI. Hunter, IQ and Porter, Laraine (eds.) (2012). British Comedy Cinema. London: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter (1993). Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutchings, Peter (2005). Beyond the New Wave: realism in British cinema, 1959–63. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 304–312. London: British Film Institute. Kelly, Terence, Norton, Graham, and Perry, George (1966). A Competitive Cinema. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Kynaston, David (2007). Austerity Britain 1945–1951. London: Bloomsbury. Kynaston, David (2010). Family Britain 1951–1957. London: Bloomsbury. Kynaston, David (2013). Modernity Britain 1957–1959. London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, Peter (1978). The Fifties. London: Heinemann. Lindner, Christopher (ed.) (2013). The James Bond Phenomenon. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mackillop, Ian and Sinyard, Neil (eds.) (2003). British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (1993). J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Marwick, Arthur (1998). The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, 1958–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMillan, John (2013). Beatles vs. Stones. New York: Simon & Schuster. Medhurst, Andy (1984). Victim: text as context. Screen 25 (4–5): 22–35. Medhurst, Andy (1986). Dirk Bogarde. In: All Our Yesterdays (ed. Charles Barr), 341–345. London: British Film Institute. Medhurst, Andy (2005). A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. London: Routledge. Movie editorial collective (1962). The British cinema. Movie 1: 3–7. Murphy, Robert (1992). Sixties British Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Murphy, Robert (2000). British Cinema and the Second World War. London: Continuum. Orwell, George (1970). Such, such were the joys. In: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume Four (ed. George Orwell), 379–422. London: Penguin. Parris, Matthew (2002). Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics. London: Penguin Viking. Petley, Julian (1986). The lost continent. In: All Our Yesterdays (ed. Charles Barr), 98–119. London: British Film Institute. Pirie, David (2007). A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Porter, Vincent (2005). The hegemonic turn: film comedies in 1950s Britain. Journal of Popular British Cinema 4: 81–94. Rebellato, Dan (1999). 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London: Routledge. Roberts, Andrew (2007). Back to school. Sight and Sound 17 (8): 46. Sandbrook, Dominic (2005). Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Abacus.



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Sandbrook, Dominic (2006). White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Abacus. Spicer, Andrew (2005). Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Street, Sarah (2005). British National Cinema. London: Routledge. Street, Sarah (2002). Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the United States. London: Continuum. Sutton, Paul (2005). If…. London: I.B. Tauris. Tarr, Carrie (1985). Sapphire, Darling and the boundaries of permitted pleasure. Screen 26 (1): 50–65. Thumin, Janet (1991). The “popular”, cash and culture in the postwar British cinema industry. Screen 32 (3): 245–271. Walker, Alexander (2005). Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the 1960s. London: Orion. Williams, Melanie (2009). Twilight women of 1950s British cinema. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 286–295. London: British Film Institute. Williams, Melanie (2012). Dawn of the kitchen sink. Sight and Sound 22 (8), August: 11.

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Irish Cinema’s First Wave Histories and Legacies of the 1970s and the 1980s Maeve Connolly

Introduction: The Arrival of an Indigenous Irish Cinema In 2014, the Irish Film Institute collaborated on two separate distribution and ­exhibition initiatives, responding to the work of Irish filmmakers who first came to prominence in the 1970s and the 1980s. One of these initiatives is a DVD entitled Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The Early Films, 1974–1985, produced and released in conjunction with an academic study (Pettit and Kopschitz Bastos 2013). The other is a multi‐part film exhibition programme, Absences and (Im)possibilities: Traces of an Experimental Cinema in Ireland, curated by the Dublin‐based Experimental Film Club and distributed by LUX, a London‐based international agency for the support and promotion of artists moving image. These two initiatives, addressing a diverse audience that includes Irish cinema scholars and those engaged in moving image production, provide diverse vantage points from which to reconsider histories and legacies of this First Wave of indigenous Irish filmmaking. Even though I use the term ‘First Wave’ to collectively categorise a group of filmmakers, including Joe Comerford, Vivienne Dick, Pat Murphy, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, and Bob Quinn, I argue against the notion of a monolithic indigenous Irish film culture. Instead, my analysis highlights the intersection of competing models and cultures of ­critical practice, and the common ground shared by filmmakers (such as Dick, Murphy, and O’Sullivan) who either studied or worked extensively outside Ireland. Informed by analysis of the distribution and exhibition practices shared by these filmmakers, I argue that the legacy of the First Wave is perhaps most apparent in  the exhibition practices developed  –  particularly since the mid‐2000s  –  at the intersection of contemporary art and film.

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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According to Martin McLoone, the ‘arrival of an indigenous Irish cinema’ (2000, p. 44) was announced by Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire in 1975. This self‐consciously Brechtian critique of cultural and political colonialism was directed by Bob Quinn, and commissioned by Sinn Fein – The Worker’s Party. At the time, the party was undergoing a shift to the left and had sought to deepen its connection with the Gaeltacht (Irish language) civil rights campaign, previously documented by Quinn in Oireachtas na nGael (1973). Set in the Galway Gaeltacht, the narrative of Quinn’s film centres on the rehearsal and staging of a play based upon an eighteenth‐ century ballad, the Lament for Art O’Leary, which recalls the story of an Irish nobleman (a descendant of Gaelic aristocracy) killed because of his refusal to conform to the Penal Laws. Through its exploration of the rehearsal process, the film dramatises a confrontation between the Irish‐speaking actors and their English director, played by the activist playwright John Arden. Quinn’s film signalled a new departure in Irish cinema for many reasons. Combining overtly political themes with formal experimentation, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire both advocated and modelled an alternative to established norms of exhibition and reception and in this respect, according to McLoone (2000, p. 135), it echoed the practices of Third Cinema, through which spectators are ideally transformed into participants. McLoone is referring primarily to the proposition for a radical political cinema advanced by Argentine filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, in a text first published (in Spanish) in 1969. This cinema was to be developed in opposition both to mainstream Hollywood and auteur cinema and Getino and Solanas specifically emphasise the revolutionary potential of film exhibition, which functions partly as the pretext for a gathering – a s­ cenario in which the spectators become actor‐participants. They describe a charged political context, in which attendance at screenings might sometimes involve an element of risk (Solanas and Getino 1978). But in other respects, their attention to the screening situation – attending to the particularities of setting, time, and materials  –  seems to parallel some of the considerations animating expanded cinema in the late 1960s and anticipates site‐specific approaches to artists’ moving image exhibition in the 1990 and the 2000s (Connolly 2009, p. 27). A key sequence in Caoineadh concerns the rehearsal of the English and Irish narration written to accompany a filmed insert, featuring a costumed Art (played by Gaeltacht activist and broadcaster Seán Bán Breathnach) on horseback, wandering through the busy streets of a modern‐day town. The director insists that the scene is to be introduced in English so that at least part of the production will be ‘accessible’ to a wider audience, but Breathnach’s character questions the realism of the setting, which substitutes Galway city for Uí Laoire’s native Macroom, resulting in  a heated exchange between director and actors. Caoineadh presents a highly ­choreographed and staged situation of film viewing, which clearly complicates the distinction between actor and spectator. Nonetheless, McLoone’s analysis underscores the particular importance of exhibition for activist filmmakers. Quinn in fact ran a cinema club at his home in Carraroe, County Galway, for several years

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in  the mid‐1970s and it is likely that he would also have been present at many screenings of his own films elsewhere during this period. This active role in film exhibition provides a point of connection with contemporaries based elsewhere, including Vivienne Dick. Originally from Donegal, Dick began working with Super 8 while immersed in New York’s ‘No Wave’ film and music scene and, like many of her peers, she often screened her films in dynamic live performance ­contexts at bars and clubs (Connolly 2004). This concern with the scene of exhibition, and with the potential political or cultural activation of the viewer, whether as individual spectator or as audience member, is far less apparent in the industry‐oriented Irish cinema that came to prominence towards the end of the 1980s. The very notion of industrial production, distribution, and exhibition is of course premised upon the mass circulation of a homogeneous commodity, with the filmmaker’s presence only required at festivals or premieres for the purposes of publicity. These activist exhibition strategies no longer play a central role in Irish cinema, yet, as I will argue in my conclusion, they have not disappeared entirely but rather have been integrated into the cultural economy of contemporary art. Here I am referring not to the value placed upon the material object of film, but rather to the scene of collective film viewing and the social architecture of the cinema, which has proved important for numerous artists, curators, and commissioners engaging with changing forms and conceptions of public space (Connolly 2012).

Critical Film Practice: Cultural and Political Contexts The indigenous cinema theorised by McLoone emerged within an era marked by social, economic, and political change, within and beyond Ireland. The late 1960s had witnessed both an expansion of radical film activity and a widespread loss of faith in established media, as evidenced by Quinn’s own departure from the Irish public service broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in protest against incidences of censorship (Doolan et al. 1969). Quinn’s actions were directly shaped by developments in Ireland, yet  also informed by a broader intersection between popular protest, industrial dispute, and philosophical inquiry, with specific implications for film culture. Sylvia Harvey’s (1978) account of May ‘68 and Film Culture highlights the radicalisation of film and literary criticism in the post‐1968 era, noting that journals, such as Cahiers du Cinema, and the newly founded Cinétheque and the literary publication Tel Quel all engaged with the issues of May ‘68, whether by exploring psychoanalytical perspectives on film or by addressing the issue of cinema and ideology. The implications for Irish film culture, while perhaps not immediately apparent, were both significant and far‐reaching. For example, the Irish filmmaker Peter Lennon achieved prominence (and a degree of notoriety) by screening his



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documentary critique of Irish society, The Rocky Road to Dublin (1968), to students and striking workers (Pettitt 2000, pp. 88–89). Although The Rocky Road to Dublin received a very limited release in Ireland (Barton 2004, p. 86), Lennon nonetheless played a role in the development of Irish cinema, as a member of the Production Board of the British Film Institute, perhaps helping to explain that organisation’s marked support for First Wave Irish filmmakers, including Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy, and Thaddeus O’Sullivan. A year before the release of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire, the Production Board actually funded the Berwick Street Film Collective’s Ireland: Behind the Wire (1974), a critical documentary focusing on the Civil Rights campaigns in Derry, which was subsequently distributed in Ireland by the Film Society of Sinn Fein  –  The Worker’s Party. The Berwick Street Film Collective were not the only radical filmmakers to focus on the Troubles and their film incorporates footage shot by Cinema Action, an equally radical group (Dickinson 1999, p. 267), during their making of a similarly political work entitled People of Ireland! (1973). These films underscore both the particular importance accorded to the North in politicised film culture during this period and the tendency towards heated critique and outright disputes over both the history and future of critical filmmaking. The early 1970s also witnessed a reconfiguration of the formalist and materialist concerns that had shaped the founding of organisations such as the London Film‐Maker’s Co‐op. The discourse of ‘political modernism’, defined as ‘decisive reorientation of the problem of the viewer and the ideological function of art through the disciplines of semiology and psychoanalysis’ (Rodowick 1994, p. 5), helped to revitalise debate around narrative, genre, and reception. The 1970s also witnessed a renewed interest in realism, anti‐realism, and the work of Brecht (Heath 1974; MacCabe 1974), which directly informed the Irish reception (Rockett 1978a) of Joe Comerford’s film Down the Corner (1978). In the meantime, changes in Irish arts policy, such as the introduction of new legislation that allowed the Irish Arts Council to support cinema as an art form for the first time, were fuelling the development of a critical film culture in Ireland. In 1977, the Arts Council offered its first Film Script Award for production (co‐funded with RTÉ) and around this time it also began to support a range of film cultural initiatives. These included Film Directions: A Film Magazine for Ireland, a quarterly publication that was jointly funded with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In addition, during this period, the Federation of Irish Film Societies, the Irish Film Theatre, and the Project Cinema Club (based in Project Arts Centre) were all partly funded by the Arts Council. Under the direction of Kevin Rockett, the programmes of Project Cinema Club engaged directly with debates around critical cinema, including those conducted in the pages of Screen and Screen Education (Rockett 1978b). For example, the club’s 1978/79 programme engaged with debates around feminist filmmaking, showing Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen, 1977); Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, 1972) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce 1080, Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), and hosting

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a talk by Mulvey (who, like Wollen, was active across the spheres of theory and practice) as part of a seminar on women and cinema. Events such as these ­illustrate the vital educational role played by cinema clubs and societies, before the   formal establishment of film studies as a discipline in Irish universities (Rockett 2003).

Makeshift Exhibition and International Circulation While some Irish filmmakers operated at a remove from Screen debates, others would have been more attuned to the redefinition of modernist and avant‐garde practice in art and film. Thaddeus O’Sullivan, one of the First Wave’s most prominent and prolific contributors, studied film at the Royal College of Art, working with tutors such as Stephen Dwoskin, who were immersed in film co‐op culture. As noted in the Introduction, 2014 witnessed the DVD release of five early works directed by O’Sullivan, including two made while he was still a student. In his contribution to the DVD booklet, Lance Pettitt frames these films, A Pint of Plain (1975) and On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978), within the context of ‘an extended creative response to the material conditions of Irish migrancy’ (2014, p. 6). Yet Pettitt is quick to emphasise that O’Sullivan did not fit the norm when he left Ireland for London in 1966, going ‘against a net inflow of migration’, during a period of relative prosperity at home (2014, p. 6). He also acknowledges other important factors shaping O’Sullivan’s practice, such as the influence of Dwoskin and structural filmmaking. Importantly, Pettitt sees no conflict between this avant‐ garde formation and O’Sullivan’s role within the First Wave. In fact, Pettitt suggests that it was precisely as a consequence of this formation (and his experience of migrancy) that O’Sullivan ‘readily took to working with the key figures among the formally experimental and critically questioning filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s ‘New Wave’ of Irish cinema, such as Joe Comerford, Cathal Black, and Pat Murphy’ (2014, p. 8). In addition to his contribution as director, O’Sullivan was responsible for cinematography on several films by Comerford and Murphy, occupying a central role in the collaborative culture of production that characterised the First Wave. Elsewhere, Pettitt has emphasised the restricted circulation of some First Wave films, noting that the early work of Comerford, O’Sullivan, and Cathal Black was ‘typically produced on 16 mm film, which limited its distribution’ (2000, p. 97). He seems to read this as a choice, rather than a consequence of modest resources, noting that The Courier and Joyriders (both 1987) were made on Super 16 mm and, as a result, could be ‘more easily and cheaply blown up to 35 mm’ (Pettitt 2000, p. 107). Sunniva O’Flynn also contributes a short text to the Thaddeus O’Sullivan DVD booklet, contextualising the use of 16 mm in Flanagan (1974), A Pint of Plain, On a Paving Stone Mounted, and Assembled Memories: Jack B. Yeats, 1871–1957 (1981).



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She notes that, in the 1970s, 16 mm was both ‘affordable and accessible … the standard gauge used by students, independent film and television makers’ (2014, p. 4). While acknowledging that 16 mm films were excluded from commercial cinema exhibition, O’Flynn nonetheless suggests that this limitation ‘may have had a liberating effect on young filmmakers whose audiences would have engaged with the work in alternative, sometimes makeshift, exhibition venues such as college halls, film societies, art‐house screens and Cinematheques’ (2014, p. 4). This description evokes a space that is physically shared by the (young) filmmaker and the audience, resonating with McLoone’s account of Third Cinema objectives and ideals. As noted by O’Flynn, many First Wave films found their way into ‘16 mm‐ friendly venues’ (2014, p. 4) beyond Ireland. For example, 16 mm prints of On a Paving Stone Mounted, Down the Corner, and Bob Quinn’s films Self‐Portrait with Red Car (1976) and Poitín (1978) (Figure 6.1) were acquired by MoMA’s Circulating Film Library, with O’Sullivan doing a public talk at the museum in 1979. In addition, during this period, the Production Board of the British Film Institute (BFI) ­supported the production and distribution of On a Paving Stone Mounted, Down the Corner, Traveller ( Joe Comerford, 1981), and Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1981). Pettitt seems to view BFI funding as a poor alternative to the more conventionally commercial model represented by the nascent Irish Film Board (IFB), which operated from 1981 to 1987. Noting that Maeve received just IR£10 000 from RTÉ, and ‘no funding from the IFB’, he observes that ‘inexperienced filmmakers like Murphy had to take funding from where they could’ (2000, p. 106). But it is possible that Murphy had specific reasons for wanting to work with British production funding. Interviewed for an Irish film magazine shortly after Maeve’s release, she frames her approach very explicitly as a critical response to her experience of studying

Figure 6.1  Irish ‘First Wave’: Bob Quinn’s Poitín (1978).

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oppositional cinema while completing an MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London. The primary subject of the RCA cinema course was ‘Northern Ireland, which had become a kind of anthropological field for certain kinds of filmmakers’ (Murphy 1982, p. 4). Prompted by this encounter with existing representations, many of them produced for British film and television, she decided to conduct her own video interviews in Belfast. It was this research material that provided the basis for the script of Maeve, which she sent directly to BFI, securing £73 000 in funds to shoot the film in Belfast with a British crew. Yet there is no doubt that some Irish filmmakers were seeking, and struggling, to access the support of the IFB during this period. By this point, Vivienne Dick’s Super 8 films had received a degree of critical acclaim in the US (Hoberman 1980) and she considered relocating to Ireland in the early 1980s (Connolly 2004). Ultimately, however, she found London to be a much more hospitable environment, securing awards and commissions from the British Arts Council and Channel 4. Yet despite her relative dissociation from Irish film culture during the First Wave era, Dick’s work clearly intersects both formally and thematically with that of O’Sullivan and her Irish‐based contemporaries, particularly in its exploration of migration, sexuality, and the representation of landscape. This is particularly apparent in Visibility: Moderate: A Tourist Film (discussed below), a film shot during a return visit to Ireland, and addressing many of the same issues – migration, s­ exuality, political repression – that animated her Irish‐based contemporaries.

First Wave Figures: Tourists, Migrants and Actors If Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire announced the arrival of a new Irish indigenous cinema, then On A Paving Stone Mounted is perhaps the first film to signal the First Wave’s concern with migration. O’Sullivan’s film opens with an address to a live (but off screen) audience, introducing a performance by the professional storyteller Eamon Kelly, but the scene then shifts as quasi‐documentary modes of representation give way to subjective camera. A woman speaks directly into the camera, as though addressing a child, and the fragmentary and disjunctive action that follows ­suggests both recollection and dislocation, with scenes of urban domesticity interspersed with images of rural folk rituals. In one ghostly overexposed sequence a group of pilgrims climb Croagh Patrick, their faces as indistinct as the voices speaking Irish on the soundtrack. These ethereal images are juxtaposed with more contemporary scenes of Kilorglin Puck Fair at night. Later, the action shifts again to a suburban London house, populated by friends and neighbours, but memories of the Fair, the seaside, and school continue to disrupt the narrative. Gradually, the thematic focus on emigration, and on the experiences of the Irish community in London, becomes more evident. Various characters deliver (apparently unscripted) monologues directly to the camera and one figure in particular,



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played by Stephen Rea, dominates the central section of the film. A key scene, set in a packed theatre, features a complex series of pans between Rea, seated on a balcony, and Christy Moore, performing onstage. As Moore sings Lanagan’s Ball and Patrick was a Gentleman (from which the phrase ‘On a Paving Stone Mounted’ is taken), the sound of the crowd can be heard. Slowly, the camera traverses the vast dark distance between stage and balcony, while Rea recounts memories of his father’s funeral, emphasising the pressure to drink whiskey and be his ‘father’s son’. He compares the weight of family history with the anonymity of London, a point that is underscored by a rapid transition to a new location in the next sequence. In the closing section, the storyteller Eamon Kelly finally appears on screen. In a comic monologue, he tells the story of ‘Mick the Fiddler’, who returns to Ireland from New York and is besieged by friends and neighbours for news of loved ones and a graphic representation of the city itself. This section is actually an excerpt from Kelly’s stage show, In My Father’s Time (performed in New York during the late 1970s) but in On a Paving Stone Mounted, the action is subtly looped and repeated. O’Sullivan was interested in Kelly because he ‘wanted to suggest that this is an actor at work … it’s a kind of professional nostalgia’ (O’Sullivan 1990) and the looping of Kelly’s words confirms the primary focus of the film, its critique of familiar representations of exile and migration and its parallel undoing of linear narrative. Irish women are notably and deliberately absent from the film, but English women figure prominently and one overtly middle‐class character (played by Miriam Margoyles) describes Ireland as the only place ‘in the British Isles’ so poor that children go without shoes. Elsewhere, younger English women are framed as consumers of Irish masculinity, exclaiming ‘that’s so Irish, you’re very good at telling stories’, and performing a cosmopolitan identity from which the central character is excluded. Informed by her own experience of living and working outside Ireland, Vivienne Dick has also repeatedly explored the theme of Irish migration, most notably in Visibility: Moderate, made during a visit to Ireland (Figure 6.2). Taking its title from a weather report, this film is a restless exploration of the perspective of outsider, played out through the genres of the home movie, advertisement, documentary, and thriller, while also loosely evoking elements of The Quiet Man ( John Ford, 1952). The pre‐credit sequence is staged around the twin towers of the World Trade Center, calling attention to the transnational economic flows structuring cultural and political relations. The first part of the film traces the journey of an Irish‐American tourist, dressed in fashionably ‘retro’ clothes, as she poses in the ruins of Irish monasteries, kisses the Blarney Stone and rides in a horse‐drawn cart. This tourist itinerary is mediated by other forms of consumer culture, as she encounters TV and radio ads promoting well‐known Irish and international brands, ranging from the low‐budget animation of ‘Jack Ryan truck rental’ to the slick suburban domestic fantasy offered by Blueband margarine. Like O’Sullivan and Quinn, Dick is drawn towards actors, filming staged performances of folk culture that form part of a tourist attraction, which seems to inspire

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Figure 6.2  ‘A restless exploration’: Vivienne Dick’s Visibility: Moderate (1981). Source: Image courtesy of Vivienne Dick.

a dreamlike scenario in which the Irish‐American heroine imagines herself as a ‘Celt’ running through a mystical rural landscape. Yet Visibility: Moderate is not exclusively concerned with cultural tourism. In fact, the pre‐credit sequence introduces a connection between power and vision; the camera pans from the spectacular view over New York City back to the central character. She is slicing a rotten pineapple, which can be read as a symbol of global trade. This alignment between spectacle and power returns in the second part of the film, which deals primarily with surveillance, and unfolds against a backdrop of political protest (focused on the hunger strikes in the North). The tourist embarks on an alternative journey, through the urban spaces of Dublin and Belfast, culminating in a (somewhat unconvincingly) staged sequence, in which one of the tourist’s Irish friends is interrogated. It is followed by an interview with former political prisoner Maureen Gibson, speaking straight to camera, dramatically shifting the tone of Visibility: Moderate and re‐framing it as a feminist critique of power and representation. Also made in 1981, Pat Murphy’s film Maeve was similarly informed by both feminist critique and direct personal experience of migrancy. But while Dick structures her film as a travelogue or road movie, Murphy draws more heavily upon melodrama. Maeve is structured around a young woman’s return to Belfast from college in London, exploring her position as both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ through interactions with her family and former boyfriend. It announces itself as melodrama primarily through devices such as flashback and voiceover, with the journey to Belfast punctuated by a total of 12 sequences exploring Maeve’s memories.



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Her recollections focus on both everyday and dramatic events, including conversations with her Republican ex‐boyfriend, her family’s traumatic move into a Protestant area, a childhood visit to the countryside with her father, stories told in the local pub, harassment by British soldiers, lessons in school, and the aftermath of a violent protest. Luke Gibbons notes that these flashbacks are ‘inserted into the narrative without the usual demarcating devices of blurred focus or dissolves – as if to say, in Maeve’s own words, that “the more you focus on the past, the more reality it gains”’ (Gibbons 1996, pp. 119–120). These flashbacks occupy a deliberately ambiguous place in relation to the diegesis, since, according to Paul Willemen, they ‘interrupt but also irrigate what could be (mis)taken for a realist drama’ (1994, p. 141). Maeve lacks an explicit demonstration of collective viewing, in the manner of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire. But it does feature several crucial scenes in which Maeve – and other characters – comment or reflect upon practices of framing and looking, including those bound to specific ideological positions, associated with colonialism, Catholicism, and Republicanism. Like Visibility: Moderate and Maeve, Joe Comerford’s Traveller tracks the movements of its mobile central characters but, in this instance, mobility is circumscribed and constrained by cultural tradition. The storyline concerns two members of the socially marginalised Irish Traveller community, an indigenous Irish minority, routinely mythologised and demonised in film and television (Connolly 2006). Based upon a script by Neil Jordan, and shot by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Comerford’s film received an Arts Council Award (in 1979) and its budget was around £80 000, the largest yet for any indigenous feature, but it did not go into production until it had secured the support of the BFI Production Board. In keeping with the approach developed in Down the Corner, Comerford chose to work with a number of non‐professional actors and the two lead roles are played by Judy Donovan, a member of the Travelling Community, and Davy Spillane, a well‐ known Irish traditional musician. The plot of Traveller is relatively conventional, suggesting a cross between a melodrama and a road‐movie: in the opening scenes, Angela (Donovan) and Michael (Spillane) are matched by their fathers and forced to marry. Following the wedding, they become embroiled in cross‐border smuggling and when hiding in a border town they begin to resolve their differences, eventually joining forces against Angela’s father. Formally, however, Traveller departs from convention, particularly if compared to films subsequently directed by Neil Jordan. There is almost no synchronised dialogue and instead audio monologues are used to communicate a sense of the characters’ inner lives, while also disrupting the linear development of the plot. Comerford deploys recognisably Brechtian distancing techniques, filming through reflective or distorted glass, incorporating short animation sequences (suggesting movement and mapping), and disjunctive flashbacks, to disrupt identification with the central characters and frustrate any expectations of a privileged or ‘authentic’ insight into Travellers’ culture. In addition, the film includes a number of musical interludes that seem to highlight the performative

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dimension of Irish and Traveller identities. This is most apparent in a scene at Angela and Michael’s wedding reception, in which Angela stares at a rotating ­mirrored ball while the singer Agnes O’Donnell, announced by the master of ceremonies, launches into the song ‘One Day at a Time’. The lyrics of the song seems to underscore Angela’s lack of autonomy, and as we hear O’Donnell sing the words, ‘I’m only a woman’, we see her for the first time and she is revealed as a strikingly androgynous older woman, dressed in a tuxedo. Even though filmmakers such as Comerford, Dick, Murphy, O’Sullivan, and Quinn were animated by disparate concerns, and informed by diverse models of critical film culture, there are many points of formal and thematic connection ­between these films. Most obviously, several are structured around the experiences of mobile protagonists, ranging from relatively privileged tourists to much more socially marginalised figures such as migrants and Irish Travellers, who are both actors and observers within these narrative. It is also worth recalling that, like Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire, Traveller, On a Paving Stone Mounted, and Visibility: Moderate all incorporate scenes with stage actors, singers, or musicians performing for live audiences. These moments of performance are narratively motivated and yet – like the tourists and exiles that animate these narratives – they also serve a deliberately dissociative, even alienating, function. The interconnections between Dick’s work and her Irish‐based contemporaries went largely unremarked in the early 1980s. But with the release of Maeve, critics such as Claire Johnston began to identify and theorise a critical current in Irish filmmaking. Writing in Screen, Johnston notes that Murphy’s film, like Kieran Hickey’s earlier Exposure (1977), explores ‘the exclusivity of the all‐male group and the threat which a woman represents’ (1982, p. 63). Citing Caoineadh Art Uí Laoire and On a Paving Stone Mounted, she also notes a broader shift, away from ‘the ­dominant classic realist aesthetic’, through the use of the lament structure and the  reworking of documentary ‘within a more fragmented narrative structure’, while at the same time framing Murphy’s film as the ‘first feminist intervention within this “new wave” of Irish film‐making’ ( Johnston 1982, p. 63). Perhaps the most significant element of her analysis, however, is its attention to the representation of landscape in Maeve. She suggests that, in order to construct ‘an imaginary for women’, the film subverts the status of landscape, as either ‘male domain … the central metaphor for generations of republican men’ or ‘the repository of a “Celtic” truth that lies beyond history and politics’ (1982, p. 59). This process of subversion required a critical reconfiguration of narrative and setting, a project taken up by Paul Willemen in a text that aims to expand definitions of avant‐garde practice, primarily to engage with films made in dialogue with the feminism (such as Godard’s Numero Deux) or within the context of anti‐ colonial movements. Referencing the work of Irish filmmakers such as Murphy, Willemen highlights a new avant‐gardism of cultural practices no longer caught in the ‘realism‐modernism dichotomy’. This new avant‐garde operates in‐between the conventions of modernism and psychological realism and represents subjectivity



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as ‘one, and only one, not necessarily important process within a situation over‐ determined by the forces that shape social existence’ (Willemen 1984, p. 68). Willemen suggest that a characteristic of this work may be the mobilisation of ‘what Raymond Williams, following Brecht, called “complex seeing”’ and he defines this, in relation to Maeve, as ‘reading of landscape within the diegesis as itself a layered set of discourses, as a text in its own right’ (1984, p. 53). Willemen actually rejects the term ‘postmodernism’ (or, to use his phrasing, ‘Post‐Modernism’) as ‘confusing’. He suggests that it compounds ‘the mystifying effects of the previous equation of modernism and avant garde’ and he situates the revival of avant‐garde practice within the context of a return to history. In subsequent theorisations of Third Cinema and the ‘National’, Willemen emphasises that, unlike European counter‐cinema, Third Cinema was always informed by an awareness of the historical variability of necessary aesthetic strategies to be adopted. Yet even if made by ‘intellectuals’, he argues, Third Cinema requires ‘close contact with popular discourses and aspirations – with a people engaged in bringing about social change’ (1989, p. 27). Focusing on the British context, he goes on to cite films such as Cinema Action’s Rocinante (1986), shot by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, along with Isaac Julien’s Territories (1984) and Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin (1984), framing these works as evidence of the ‘re‐actualisation’ of the Third Cinema debates from a position of ‘outside‐otherness … the only vantage point from which a viable cultural politics may be conducted in the UK’ (Willemen 1989, pp. 28–29). Despite this expansion of film cultural activity, and the critical attention it ­generated both within and beyond Ireland, the First Wave did not constitute an organised movement. In fact, it could be argued that the overarching characteristic of First Wave filmmaking – a critical approach to the representation of landscape, history, and identity  –  did not become fully apparent until it was beginning to decline. The first edition of Cinema and Ireland (in 1987) clearly highlighted the oppositional character of indigenous filmmaking, yet its publication coincided with a temporary diminution in state support for Irish filmmaking and the ‘Postscript’ to the second edition of Cinema and Ireland noted the abolition (by the new Fianna Fail government) of the Irish Film Board. Although this was ostensibly for financial reasons, the authors observed that many of the films funded by the Board were ‘perceived as undermining the image of contemporary Ireland which the state itself wished to project’ (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 133).

Histories and Archaeologies By the early 1990s, government funding for the indigenous film industry had been re‐established in the form of the more industry‐oriented Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann. As 35 mm feature film production increased, a more

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formally and politically conservative cinema emerged, prompting criticism from both theorists and practitioners. In his contribution to a special issue of Cineaste in 1997, for example, Kevin Rockett laments the emergence of an Irish cinema modelled on Hollywood genres, noting a pronounced shift away from the culturally engaged practice of the late 1970 and 1980s (Rockett 1999). Yet even though many proponents of First Wave filmmaking were struggling to resource new projects, their work remained an important point of reference for scholars in the field of Irish cinema studies, which expanded in parallel with feature film production ­during the 1990s. Several important histories of Irish cinema were published in the early 2000s, including Martin McLoone’s Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, already cited, and Lance Pettitt’s Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation, which includes a short section on ‘indigenous experimentation’, framed as an alternative to the ‘large‐budget, panoramic pictures about Ireland’, by international directors such as David Lean and Stanley Kubrick (2000, p. 103). Noting that the early 1970s marked a period of both rapid social change and brief affluence, for some, Pettitt emphasises that the films of Quinn, Comerford, Cathal Black, and their contemporaries often focused specifically on those ‘pushed to the margins of this new Ireland’, including ‘Travellers, unemployed people’ and the homeless (2000, p. 103). He points out that while some of these filmmakers chose to address the political situation in the North obliquely, Murphy’s film tackled this ‘forbidden topic’ more directly ‘by provocatively linking it to the gendered nature of power and historical discourse’ (2000, p. 105). Although Pettitt acknowledges the specificity of indigenous experimentation, he is keen to emphasise continuities with Irish cinema in the 1990s, highlighting what he sees as a ‘vital element running through contemporary Irish film culture’ extending from ‘experimental, formalist films’ (2000, p. 254) such as A Pint of Plain and Comerford’s Waterbag (1984) to critically acclaimed shorts engaging with the history of the Troubles, such as Stephen Burke’s films After ‘68 (1994) and 81 (1996). Ruth Barton’s (2004) account of the First Wave also acknowledges a degree of continuity, in that it positions the ‘Irish independents’ of the 1970s and 1980s within contemporary Irish cinema. She emphasises, however, that the First Wave sought to establish a ‘new Irish cinematic idiom’ precisely by operating ‘within an international movement of avant‐garde, experimental and low‐budget filmmaking ­practices’ (Barton 2004, p. 85), even if Ireland lacked the formal structures (such as co‐operatives) associated with this movement. Noting that this period has ‘come to be retrospectively regarded as something of a golden age of filmmaking’, Barton points out that even though the First Wave filmmakers had to compete with each other for the ‘very limited sources of finances’ available in Ireland, they frequently collaborated on film production ‘arguably contributing to a similarity in aesthetics and style’ (2004, p. 88). This collaborative dimension seems highly significant and certainly seems less pronounced in the self‐consciously ‘industrial’ film culture that succeeded the First Wave.



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Like McLoone, Barton recognises Third Cinema as an important reference point in the critical reception of these films. Ultimately, however, she argues for a different framework, more indebted to Colin McArthur’s concept of a ‘poor Celtic cinema’, which prioritises a sense of history and the social over the ‘unpleasure’ of the avant‐garde (McArthur 1994). Yet even though First Wave filmmaking rarely embraced ‘unpleasure’ it has been repeatedly designated  –  and sometimes celebrated  –  by critics as ‘experimental’, while at the same time relegated to the margins of ostensibly industrialised Irish cinema. Debbie Ging laments this situation in a contribution to an anthology of texts on the reinvention of Ireland in the Celtic Tiger era, noting that the work of filmmakers such as Joe Comerford and Pat Murphy has been ‘written off as experimental or avant‐garde and thus of little relevance to what we might now refer to as a national film industry’ (2002, p. 146). According to Ging, the films of the First Wave were dismissed on the grounds of content as well as form; ­precisely because they often deal thematically with issues such as ‘religion, ­violence, Travellers, national identity and feminism’ (Ging 2002, p. 178), they were incorrectly associated with oppressive cultural tradition. Countering this dismissal, Ging argues that First Wave films very often engaged directly with, and gave visibility to, individuals and groups excluded by cultural nationalist models of Irish identity (2002, p. 178). Ging further suggests that, while the films of the 1970s and early 1980s often sought to articulate contradictory aspects of identity, the Celtic Tiger era witnessed a more affirmative approach to identity, in keeping with a ‘more marketable vision of Irishness’ (2002, p. 177). She attributes the ‘writing off ’ of the First Wave primarily to the emergence of this market‐oriented ethos: Just as this ‘cinema of resistance’ was starting to get off the ground, the growth in multinational investment and our increasing sense of global identity shifted the focus from a concern with popular memory to a concern with constructing a more ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan identity. (Ging 2002, p. 185)

Even though it was published several years before the consequences of Celtic Tiger‐excess were to become fully apparent, Ging’s analysis articulates an already evident disquiet over the role of culture in Irish society. Ruth Barton’s position is rather different, and she argues that ‘issues of marginalisation and dispossession’ continued to engage Irish filmmakers in the early 2000s (2004, p.  110). On balance, however, the First Wave has been historicized as much more socially and politically engaged than the industrially‐oriented film culture that became established in the 1990s. Also, as we will see, it is precisely the notion of an economically marginalised, yet ideologically robust, ‘cinema of resistance’ – exemplified by Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin – that seems to have captured the interest and imagination of contemporary Irish artists working with the moving image.

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Curating First Wave Film Culture If the early 2000s witnessed an expansion of publishing activity in Irish cinema studies, this was paralleled by a different form of retrospection regarding the film practices of the 1970 and 1980s. Visitors to the Irish Film Centre during March and April of 2003 had the opportunity to view an unrivalled selection of Irish films, screened within the context of two different retrospective seasons, each celebrating the anniversary of a significant milestone in film policy. The first of these, 30 Years On: The Arts Council and The Film Maker, was a joint initiative on the part of the Arts Council and the Film Institute of Ireland, organised by Ted Sheehy and Grainne Humphreys, with the intention of highlighting the Council’s involvement in film and video since the introduction of the 1973 Arts Act. It included a programme of 45 screenings, a temporary video library, a catalogue, and public forums on preservation and arts policy featuring filmmakers, archivists, and policy‐makers. The second event, New Irish Cinema: 1993–2003, marked the tenth anniversary of the revived Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann and encompassed screenings of 76 Irish feature films, a comprehensive publication, edited by Kevin Rockett, and a ‘Day of Debate’ with contributions from filmmakers, critics, and lobbyists. Both festivals provided opportunities to historicise the practices of the First Wave, but 30 Years On was perhaps particularly important in its reframing of film production activity as ‘art’. Although its printed catalogue was modest (especially by comparison with the New Irish Cinema: 1993–2003 publication), it nonetheless illustrated the breadth of Arts Council‐funded filmmaking. Presented without an obvious thematic or chronological structure, the screenings ranged from First Wave productions, including Quinn’s Cloch (1975) and Poitín (1978), Cathal Black’s Wheels (1976), Comerford’s Down the Corner, Traveller, and Waterbag, to Vivienne Dick’s autobiographical video essay A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy (1994), and short scripted dramas such as Stephen Burke’s After ‘68. It also included Hush‐A‐Bye Baby (1989), directed by Margo Harkin and produced by Tom Collins and the Derry Film & Video Workshop with the support of Channel 4. 30 Years On was also significant because, through the inclusion of works such as Clare Langan’s Forty Below (1999) and Blue Funk’s C Oblique O (1999), it pointed towards a potential expansion of both funding and exhibition opportunities for artists’ films and videos. During the decade that has elapsed since this period of retrospection in the early 2000s, organisations such as the Irish Film Institute have developed a much more prominent role in the exhibition of experimental film and artists’ moving image. In addition to hosting and supporting monthly screenings organised by Experimental Film Club, IFI has collaborated with several of the club’s founders, Aoife Desmond, Alan Lambert, Donal Foreman, and Esperanza Collado, on the curation of the touring programme, entitled Absences and (Im)possibilities: Traces of an Experimental Cinema in Ireland. Through its tripartite structure, which spans



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disparate moments and contexts of Irish film production, the programme directly addresses the challenge of constructing any coherent lineage of Irish experimental film practice. Perhaps somewhat provocatively, the First Wave‐focused section of Absences and (Im)possibilities consists solely of three films: Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), directed by Alan Schneider, Bob Quinn’s Self‐Portrait with Red Car (1976), shot by Joe Comerford, and Vivienne Dick’s Guérrillère Talks (1978), made while she was based in New York. It is certainly possible to identify loose parallels between Film and Self‐Portrait with Red Car in that both were made with a professional production crew, problematise speech, emphasise absurdity, and feature individual male protagonists engaged in a struggle with their surroundings. But Dick’s work, which takes its title from a 1969 book (Les Guérrillères) by Monique Wittig exploring female ­sexuality and identity, seems to explore quite different subject matter and also exemplifies a much more handmade model of filmmaking. It is composed of unedited improvised monologues (each running the length of a Super‐8 roll) by prominent women in New York’s underground ‘No Wave’ art and music scene, interspersed with frames of leader strip. By placing these three works together, the curators of Absences and (Im)possibilities (several of whom are also artists or filmmakers) differentiate their history of the First Wave from the accounts offered, for example, by scholars such as Barton, McLoone, and Pettitt. So, for example, they reject what they see as the tendency for Irish cinema studies scholars to use the term ‘experimental’ to label works that resist easy categorisation, or to signify a pre‐existing ‘genre … defined by recurring familiar elements, such as structural archetypes, visual techniques or iconography’ (IFI 2013). They propose a mode of experimental practice that is organised around social and political action, rather than formalism. Framing First Wave film culture as ‘the first real movement of independent, indigenous filmmaking’ in Ireland, they specifically highlight its collaborative, even potentially collective, dimension. They note, for example, that many of the First Wave’s key figures were involved in ‘the collective AIP (Association of Independent Producers)’. AIP is described as ‘one of the most identifiable formations to emerge from this period’, perhaps signalling that this ‘collective’ fulfils a symbolic role in their history, standing in for the co‐operative structures never fully realised by Irish‐based filmmakers.

Conclusion: Legacies of the First Wave The Absences and (Im)possibilities programme employs a relatively conventional approach to exhibition. Other Irish‐based practitioners have, however, developed projects that engage with film history yet are much more attuned to the material, social, and imaginative architectures of cinema. Commissioned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Jesse Jones’s

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Figure 6.3  Jesse Jones’ 12 Angry Films (2006), a site‐specific installation in the form of a drive‐in cinema. Source: Photograph: Hugh McElveen. Image courtesy of Jesse Jones.

12 Angry Films was devised as a site‐specific installation in the form of a drive‐in cinema presented over three days in November 2006 (Figure 6.3). Located at the Pigeon House, a disused power station near Dublin Port, Jones’s project was devised as a direct response to the planned redevelopment of this former industrial area. The temporary drive‐in cinema could only be accessed and experienced by  car, drawing attention to infrastructural networks and flows linking (and ­separating) the port from the rest of the city. The screening programme consisted of 12 films exploring social justice and labour issues, including six features, ranging from Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954) and The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) to a selection of video works made by Jones with an elective community of participants, motivated by a shared interest in migrancy, labour, and social justice. Significantly, this community was formed through a series of discursive events and meetings, held at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, including a session conducted with the participation of Peter Lennon, which explored the ­production and reception of The Rocky Road to Dublin. Even though its concerns clearly extended well beyond Irish cinema, 12 Angry Films both invoked the history of the First Wave (through Lennon’s involvement) and mobilised several of its most distinctive characteristics, from collaborative ­production to ‘makeshift’ exhibition venues (O’Flynn 2014, p. 4). In subsequent projects, Jones has continued to critically mine the history of political modernism, developing a series of 16 mm films (Trilogy of Dust, 2009–2011) using Brechtian



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concepts and techniques to explore and interrogate the speculative economy of late capitalism. Many of these projects were realised over several years and Jones has also frequently organised public events such as screenings or seminars as part of her research process, recalling the Third Cinema ideal of film exhibition as ‘meeting’. Jones has been especially consistent in her mining of the social and political histories of radical cinema but many other contemporary artists based in Ireland or elsewhere (including, for example, Sarah Browne, Duncan Campbell, Declan Clarke, Willie Doherty, Jaki Irvine, Daniel Jewesbury, Gareth Kennedy, and Sarah Pierce) have either explicitly or implicitly invoked theories and histories of radical film exhibition in the development of projects for gallery installation. It could perhaps be argued that the entry of radical film histories and practices into contemporary art galleries signals (or even contributes) to the dissociation of radical cinema from broader socio‐political circulation. More generally, the past decade has witnessed a pervasive interest in art as ‘social practice’ and in curatorially‐led initiatives that seek to mobilise the art institution as a kind of model public sphere, with the result that art galleries have been transformed, both physically and operationally, into temporary schools, cinemas, subsidised cafés, publishing houses, or discussion spaces, with little or no emphasis on the display of art objects (Farquharson 2006; Montmann 2006). Generally intended as temporary interruptions to the gallery programme, such initiatives are often explicitly propositional and symbolic, sometimes favouring the short‐term interests of art communities over the long‐term needs of other constituencies. At the same time, however, some publicly‐funded art galleries have also offered vital resources for activist organisations deploying media for social and political change, over a longer period of time. Within the UK, for example, contemporary art spaces such as the Showroom (London) and the Tetley (Leeds) have supported and facilitated the political work of activist group Justice for Domestic Workers, hosting meetings as well as more publicly‐oriented events such as screenings and talks. Long‐term collaborations between art galleries and activist organisations are relatively rare but even temporary exhibitions can offer an important platform for social and political critique, within specific contexts. For example, during the period leading up to, and immediately following, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy, several publicly‐funded art institutions significantly altered their ­programmes to address the impending crisis. Two of the more prominent examples are Re: Public, organised by guest curator Daniel Jewesbury at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin, 2010), which sought to constitute its audience as a ‘public’ through a range of performance and screening events (Connolly 2011) and The Prehistory of the Crisis (2008–2009), a two‐part show that was presented in the galleries of Project Arts Centre (curated by Tessa Giblin) and Belfast Exposed (curated by Monica Nunez). Giblin and Nunez sought to understand how the impending recession might impact upon the situation of migrant workers and  asylum‐seekers in Ireland, informed partly by analysis of sectarianism in Northern Ireland.

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While a full discussion of these projects is not possible here, it is significant that both involved the participation of several artists, critics, and curators working actively in art education, in Ireland and elsewhere. Exhibition projects like these articulate the very close ties between art practice, research, and education, and the shared value placed by practitioners, researchers, and educators on temporary events (including screenings) as pretexts for ‘gathering’. This close collaboration between spheres of film production, criticism, and education was also apparent in First Wave film culture, as evidenced by the work of Project Cinema Club, an initiative that preceded the full establishment of both film studies in Ireland and industry‐oriented courses in film production. During the 1980s, Irish film studies and film practice emerged as distinct spheres of activity, resulting (in some educational contexts) in a clear separation between film production and critique, a separation that does not exist to the same extent in art education. Ireland’s industry‐ oriented film production culture is consequently less hospitable to the culture of  philosophical and political debate that once animated the First Wave (and ­continues to engage many contemporary artists). It may be that some contemporary artists are drawn towards the political discourses that animated film culture in the 1970s because of the symbolic value attached to ostensibly non‐commercial activity within the art economy (Horowitz 2011). But such a reading overlooks the time and energy invested in long‐term practices of peer‐based critique routinely developed and sustained by artists and curators working with the moving image, through initiatives such as the LUX Critical Forum groups. Formed after the dissolution of the London Filmmakers Co‐op, LUX is one of the most important European resource organisations dedicated to artists’ moving image. The Critical Forum groups, established in Dublin, London, and Glasgow since 2011, are designed to facilitate the shared viewing and discussion of film and video for educational purposes, providing subsidised access to works in the collection, with LUX staff playing a developmental role in film cultures both within and beyond the UK. Considered together, initiatives such as the Absences and (Im)possibilities screening programme, the 12 Angry Films drive‐in cinema, and the LUX Critical Forum network, demonstrate that the legacy of the First Wave persists. It finds expression in critical histories of the ‘Golden Age’ of Irish indigenous cinema, and in the ongoing exhibition practices of contemporary artists working with the moving image.

References Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Connolly, Maeve (2004). Sighting an Irish avant‐garde in the intersection of local and international film cultures. Boundary 2: International Journal of Literature and Culture 13 (1): 244–265.



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Connolly, Maeve (2009). The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and University of Chicago Press. Connolly, Maeve (2006). A bit of a traveller in everybody: Traveller identities in Irish and American culture. In: The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (ed. Diane Negra), 282–317. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, Maeve (2011). re: public. Art & The Public Sphere 1 (1): 92–97. Connolly, Maeve (2012). Temporality, sociality, publicness: cinema as art project. Afterall 29: 4–15. Dickinson, Margaret (1999). Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90. London: BFI. Doolan, Lelia, Dowling, Jack, and Quinn, Bob (1969). Sit Down and Be Counted: The Cultural Evolution of a Television Station. Dublin: Wellington. Farquharson, Alex (2006). Bureaux de change. Frieze 101: 156–159. Gibbons, Luke (1996). Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day. Ging, Debbie (2002). Screening the green: cinema under the Celtic Tiger. In: Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin), 177–195. London: Pluto Press. Harvey, Sylvia (1978). May’68 and Film Culture. London: British Film Institute. Heath, Stephen (1974). Lessons from Brecht. Screen 15 (2): 103–128. Hoberman, J (1980). Notes on three films by Vivienne Dick. Millennium Film Journal 6: 90–94. Horowitz, Noah (2011). Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Irish Film Institute. (2013). ‘Absences and (im)possibilities: traces of an experi­mental cinema in Ireland’. Available at: http://www.ifi.ie/wp‐content/uploads/Experimental‐Film‐ Programme‐Essay‐and‐Programme.pdf (accessed 4 October 2014). Johnston, Claire (1982). Maeve. Screen 22 (4): 54–71. MacCabe, Colin (1974). Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses. Screen 15 (2): 7–27. McArthur, Colin (1994). The cultural necessity of a poor Celtic cinema. In: Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe (ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth), 112–125. Belfast and London: Institute of Irish Studies/BFI. McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI. Montmann, Nina (2006). Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations. London: Black Dog Publishing. Murphy, Patsy (1982). Maeve. IFT News 14 (5): 4. O’Flynn, Sunniva (2014). En‐gauging with the work. In: Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The Early Films, 1974–1985 (DVD booklet), 6–9. Dublin and London: Irish Film Institute/St. Mary’s University. O’Sullivan, Thaddeus (1990). Fragments in pictures’, interview by Luke Gibbons. Film Base News 10: 8–12. Pettitt, Lance (2000). Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pettitt, Lance (2014). Thaddeus O’Sullivan: the early films, 1974–1985. In: Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The Early Films, 1974–1985 (DVD booklet), 6–9. Dublin and London: Irish Film Institute/St. Mary’s University.

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Pettit, Lance and Kopschitz Bastos, B. (eds.) (2013). The Woman Who Married Clark Gable. São Paulo: USP/Humanitas. Rockett, Kevin (1978a). The realism debate and Down the Corner. Film Directions 1 (2): 18–20. Rockett, Kevin (1978b). Constructing a film culture: Ireland. Screen Education 27: 23–33. Rockett, Kevin (1999). Irish cinema: the national in the international. Cineaste XXIV (2–3): 23–25. Rockett, Kevin (2003). Origins and orientations: an interview with Kevin Rockett, on Irish film studies. Interview by Des O’Rawe The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 29 (2): 57–61. Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke, and Hill, John (1988). Cinema and Ireland. rev. edn. London: Routledge. Rodowick, D.N. (1982). Politics, theory and the avant‐garde. Undercut 3–4 (March): 60–63. Rodowick, D.N. (ed.) (1994). The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio (1978). Towards a third cinema. In: Movies and Methods: An Anthology (ed. Bill Nichols), 44–64. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Willemen, Paul (1999). An avant garde for the eighties. Framework 24: 53–73. Willemen, Paul (1989). The third cinema question. In: Questions of Third Cinema (ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen), 30–52. London: BFI. Willemen, Paul (1994). Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. London and Bloomington, IN: BFI and Indiana University Press.

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History, Heritage and the National Past in British Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s Geoff Eley Introduction There is now a vast critical literature on film and filmmaking that takes a clear ‘­historical view’, situating itself in particular times and period settings, whether for the study of particular genres or auteurs, for the textual play of particular themes on and against contemporary social and political contexts, for the structure of national film industries and their output, for the shifting character of the cinema audience, for varying regimes of censorship, for the overall thematics of particular periods, and so forth. Such literatures have also acquired a remarkable density. This work, however, has originated almost exclusively from inside film studies and has generated a very interesting bifurcation. On the one hand, there is an increasingly large body of work within film studies that approaches film historically, if usually without the thickness of contextualising that historians prefer. On the other hand, historians very rarely approach the study of film on its own terms in a way that could satisfy the expectations of scholars working in film studies, which has its own distinctive protocols of theory, evidence, and methodology. Whereas numerous historians have been attracted to ‘using’ film instrumentally, very few of them think explicitly about how film produces history of its own (with notable exceptions such as Sklar and Musser (1990) and Rosenstone (1995a, 1995b)). As a result, there has been relatively little attempt to explore how film ‘makes’ ­history – that is, the ways in which it constructs historical arguments or lays out a field of historical meanings, the degree to which it constructs and reconstructs a relation of its makers and audiences to particular histories, the ways in which its aesthetics and visual languages imagine or inscribe historicity, and the ways in which it appropriates the past consciously and unconsciously as history. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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When historians use or invoke film, for the most part, they tend to think in terms of reflection or reception. They mainly see film’s place in a social and cultural history of popular entertainment and leisure (far less frequently as an art form inside particular circuits of intellectual life), its centrality to modern forms of propaganda, its place in the economics of taste, and so forth. Film is taken to mirror or reflect the society and values of the time. To be sure, film may be studied historically in a wide variety of legitimate ways. These can definitely include sophisticated versions of the ‘cinema and society’ paradigm, to be found in the work of Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate.1 It is also possible to treat film and cinema as part of the history of the emergence of mass culture and the transformations of the public sphere. We can approach cinema too as a lens through which to theorise and concretise questions of the emergence of metropolitan modernity (see, for instance, Schwartz [1998] and Singer [2001]). For historians, each of these remains a perfectly valid option. But even the best practitioners tend to neglect the film itself, in the sense of how it works, what it actually says, and the internal structure of its visual languages, its specificities as a medium, and the more formalist aspects of its operation. Historians seldom pose the question of a film’s agency and effect: namely, what is the particular work that a film can do? What we really need is to bring these two very different grounds of disciplinary inquiry together while overcoming some of the limitations in each – to produce convincingly contextualised and historicised studies of cinema that simultaneously develop formal readings of the filmic texts themselves. Historians too often treat film as though it functions as a simple screen onto which ideas and values are projected that come from elsewhere – from the director’s and screenwriter’s intentions, from the literary sources of an adaptation, from the surrounding political climate of the times, from the power of certain cultural tropes, from prevailing patterns of contemporary cultural life, from dominant ideologies, and so forth. We need a more active notion of film than this. We need to see it as a site of cultural production, where particular representations and representational strategies and repertoires are proposed and shaped, where ideas and values are themselves produced and reworked. In this regard, a particular film’s pertinence for history – its possible uses and terms of interest – may reside only partly in its explicit purposes and contents, whether these address the past directly through an overtly marshalled set of subject matters or derive from the time and place in which the film was made. Some films will certainly be self‐consciously and deliberately ‘about’ the British national past in that sense, for example. But this is not the only form of a film’s relation to history. Rather, films may also tell history inadvertently, obliquely and in spite of themselves. If they make history in their own right, they possess an unconscious too. Films may evoke and appropriate a particular past (the past of a place, the past of a class, the past of the nation) in the course of telling formally contemporary stories, whose seeming innocence belies a wealth of historical meaning – the complicated ways in which the national past, for example, is constantly being allegorised and worked into persuasively presented and emotionally



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satisfying narratives in both openly resonant and insidiously powerful ways. Once film is approached in this way, it can be treated not only as a historical ‘source’ (film as a visual archive), but far more as a medium of historical argument in itself. In that case, film becomes a place where meanings about the past are produced, contested, and secured – that is, film as a text, film as a type of historical representation. Of course, the way in which a film manages to represent the past – its particular historicity, so to speak – is not divorced from the thought and politics of the times, including all of their heterogeneity and contentiousness. That contemporary climate and its effects unavoidably shape and inform the particular content, language, pacing, stylistics, tones, and visual aesthetic of a film, including the images and citations it assembles into arguments; the scenes of in/action through which agency is conveyed (or its absence); what it chooses as materials for allegory; what it weaves into narrative; but also how the editing and camerawork choose to deal with temporality and their particular techniques for conveying change, rupture, causality, continuities, repetitions, linearity, reversal, memory, futurity, and the boundaries between present and past. Depending on the director and the wider team of collaborators, these contextual relations may well be consciously and reflectively present, in some degree, supplying a well‐ordered coherence and ­shaping the film via types of controlling intelligence. But they can also be less consciously active, or barely conscious at all, registering their effects in confused and symptomatic fashion. By developing a better sense of how films work in all of these respects, historians and film scholars can work back and out from the film itself into the wider fields of contextual meaning. Films will not open a window directly onto the past. But they can suggest fruitful and unexpected questions. In my own work, I have been interested in using film to open up and explore access to changes in the languages of national identification in Britain between the 1960s and 1990s as they helped shape or reshape the stabilities and shifting grounds of politics. For many years the Second World War formed a template for the popular political imagination, fashioned from the reforms of 1945–1951 and the Conservative renormalising of the 1950s. In Britain’s version of the post‐war settlement, a powerful narrative of collective endeavour and populist egalitarianism, organised around the painful memories of the Depression and the patriotic solidarities of the wartime, became textured into the working consensus of British public life. During the 1960s and 1970s, a fresh wave of changes then loosened the hold of this structure, opening a brief period of new disturbances and new possibilities. But the reworking of popular memory during the Thatcherist 1980s, beginning already in the confrontational politics of the mid‐1970s, brought this moment of radical openness to a close. While the economy was being restructured, the Falklands/Malvinas War also helped reinscribe the languages of polity and nation, now in the recovered Churchillian tones of late‐imperial militarism and racialised cultural superiority, which exchanged the ideals of social justice for a patriotism straight and pure. Amid the turmoil of the late twentieth‐century changes – deindustrialisation, class recomposition, trade union defeat, dismantling

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of the welfare state, divisiveness of gender and sexual politics, the racialised politics of immigration, late‐imperial decline – British public memory became the site of far‐reaching conflicts over how the earlier twentieth century should now be understood, sometimes openly linked to undisguised political agendas, sometimes conducted with greater allegorical distance, and ranging across many different sectors of national life, from the arts and entertainment worlds to the shaping of educational policy and the rise of the heritage industry. In earlier essays I have therefore tried to explore various facets of this process of change. During the 1980s, for example, a number of key filmmakers called on strong and coherent ideals of British working‐class masculinity to figure an argument about the collapse of self‐consciously identified traditional values. Counterposing the consequences of Thatcherist individualism, ruthless entrepreneurialism, deindustrialisation, and social modernisation against a seductive cultural nostalgia for ordinariness and dependable decency, in ways echoing earlier moments of a well‐tried and long‐lasting working‐class representational repertoire, these films continued evoking an iconic but fast‐vanishing landscape of ­historic working‐class communities, occupational cultures, and collective solidarities. Using Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), I suggested how this reflex to a post‐war mythology of working‐class Britishness might have been changing, allowing a different space of thought and imagination around the contemporary working class thereby to open up (Eley 1995). Simultaneously, a further range of films, directed, for example, by Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Isaac Julien, or Gurinda Chadha, was beginning to acknowledge the disordering of previously secure identities, suggesting in what other ways collective social and cultural belonging might then be conceived, engaging the possibility of a ‘version of Britishness that does not necessarily belong to the English’ (Malik 1996, p. 214). Those films were ‘set firmly in the present, away from the centres of power, in an unstable and socially divided postimperialist and/or working‐class Britain, where identities are shifting, fluid, and heterogeneous’ (Higson 1993, p. 110). In another, oddly complementary strand of 1980s cinema, other filmmakers concurrently produced class‐saturated morality tales of social unease and moral decay, bleakly dissecting the post‐war conformities of Britain’s long 1950s. These included films such as Dance with a Stranger (Mike Newell, 1985), Wish You Were Here (David Leland, 1987), Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987), White Mischief (Michael Radford, 1987), Scandal (Michael Caton‐Jones, 1989), The Krays (Peter Medak, 1990), Let Him Have It (Medak, 1992), and, perhaps the most interesting of all, Intimate Relations (Philip Goodhew, 1996). Finally in this regard, another cycle responded to the earliest stages in the restructuring of capitalism and the ­seemingly unstoppable casualising of labour markets (de‐skilling, de‐unionising, de‐regulating, de‐nationalising), with their disorganising of the material circumstances and social relations of working‐class life. Amid the ruins of industrial capitalism, those films tell stories of the damaging of masculinities, the disordering of families, and gutting of the assured expectations of youth. While directors



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such as Alan Clarke, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh grasped these logics earlier in the 1980s, a definite cluster of films appeared by the middle of the next decade, framed most starkly by Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1995) and Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997). Keeping pace with the societal changes, this remains an active strand of British filmmaking, borne most emblematically by Shane Meadows in This is England (2006) and its companions, Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and Somers Town (2008).2 A final notable strand of this period, starting from the early 1980s and quickening into a genre by the 1990s, was the so‐called heritage film, which in popularity, cultural resonance, and wider public effects probably carried the most influence of all (Higson 1993).3 Announced and initiated by Hugh Hudson’s 1981 Oscar‐winning Chariots of Fire, it continued through Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984) and an entire sequence of E.M. Forster adaptations: A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984); A Room with a View ( James Ivory, 1985); Maurice ( James Ivory, 1987); Where Angels Fear to Tread (Charles Sturridge, 1991); and Howards End ( James Ivory, 1991). This chain was completed by Enchanted April (Mike Newell, 1991); Remains of the Day ( James Ivory, 1993); Shadowlands (Richard Attenborough, 1993); Tom & Viv (Brian Gilbert, 1994); and Carrington (Christopher Hampton, 1995). In the cognate medium, the cycle began with Granada Television’s serialisation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay‐Hogg, 1981), whose success later inspired A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1987). A further prestigious Granada serial might also be included, namely, the dramatising of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet as The Jewel in the Crown (Christopher Morahan, 1982), along with two other films about India, Heat and Dust ( James Ivory, 1982) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982). The list might be stretched to include films such as Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992), or even Angels and Insects (Philip Haas, 1995).4 In contrast with the other strands of cinema mentioned above, these heritage films offer a refuge. They privilege a particular construction of the British past, running between the Edwardian years and the Second World War, sometimes extending into the 1950s, in which the English upper classes mainly people the screen (Figure 7.1). They ‘offer apparently more settled and visually splendid manifestations of an essentially pastoral national identity and authentic culture: “Englishness” as an ancient and natural inheritance, Great Britain, the United Kingdom’ (Higson 1993, p. 110). Recurring to such a ground of ‘pastness’ throws the present potentially into a bleaker light, but with a critical edge all but blunted by wistfulness. Such a vision can become all too easily simplified into a by‐now over‐familiar composite of celebratory regret: The nostalgia here is a sickening for a homeland where there is endless cricket, fair play with bent rules, fumbled sex, village teas, and punting through long green summers. British identities have been subsumed under a particular version of Englishness. (Wollen 1991, p. 182)

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Figure 7.1  ‘A particular construction of the British past’: A Room with a View (1985).

Even where the setting falls later (as in Shadowlands and Remains of the Day), the sensibility is unavoidably interwar. The unpleasantness of the present is managed by invoking a time apparently untroubled by the salient economic and social ­disruptions of the later twentieth century. For critical left‐wing sensibilities, such films are easily caricatured or dismissed. They affirm a strong image of Britishness through the telling of romantic stories which allegorise the wish for the wholeness of the nation. They trade on the taken‐ for‐grantedness of a certain set of traditions, including a definite characterological heritage, a deep reservoir of cultural citation, and a visual repertoire of landscape, architecture, gardens, furnishings, clothing, and bodily comportment. Drawing on a dense archive of representations and cognate historical assumptions, they offer easy incitements to nostalgia in the image of an unconflicted national past. The construction of the latter, for international as well as home consumption, with all the visual pleasures of fine acting, literate screenplays, and beautiful production values, laden with associated iconicities of period and landscape, promises a safe place of national identification, where the present’s difficulties can be sublimated, a place where Englishness can imagine itself whole.5 Yet, in however reduced and attenuated a way, there is much more going on in these films, various undercurrents of critical ambivalence about English traditions and the importance of ‘being modern’, to whose complicated meanings the films’ partially hidden Bloomsbury resonances and citations can give us the clue. At the surface level of plotting and characterisation, to be sure, ‘Bloomsbury’ appears mainly as a coterie of famous names simply inhabiting a common period, with scant regard for distinctions among the set’s central or peripheral members and



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other intellectual and literary figures who were around at the time but largely on the outside. But at the same time, the films draw avidly on Bloomsbury as a kind of collective text, where the lives concerned marked the courageously holistic honouring of personal truth, sexual freedom, critical thought, modernist aesthetics, and a definite relationship to progressive politics. Some of that ethico‐ philosophical bundle – notably, the left‐inclined politics and an outward‐looking cosmopolitanism  –  recedes from the architecture and story‐telling of the films themselves virtually entirely. But the valorising of personal integrity, emotional honesty, and open expressivity  –  the importance of individual feelings and the courage to acknowledge them  –  inside a modernist philosophy of true personhood remains fundamental to what they actually accomplish. Those elements cut across the Thatcherist grain. On the one hand, the directions of historic Bloomsbury’s longer‐term influence – in this context, the commitment to radical personhood – helped decisively shift the script of cultural value in the dominant structures of feeling of post‐1945 Britain, opening a space of critique and dissidence that really endured. On the other hand, these films made in the 1980s and 1990s would be entirely unintelligible in the absence of the cultural sensibility engendered by post‐1960s feminism, even as the latter enters the films in its least reflective and radical versions. While telling women’s stories, taking the woman’s point of view, and showing strong and interesting women characters, the films usually reinscribe female agency inside exactly the conventional horizons or roles (marriage, family, dependency, illness, disturbance) they had begun by wanting to surpass. Yet the process of the filmic narrative – the chinks and discordances, the early outlining of contradictions  –  leaves open the space for less conventional imagining and identification. The stories of true feeling, erotic awakening, transgression, intimacy, and independence, inspired by the ethics of emotional honesty and the emancipated life, resist being fully normalised (Eley 2009). How can the study of these disparate bodies of filmmaking help with the analysis of social, cultural, and political change? In their respective ways, each of the strands I have been discussing develop a complicated set of arguments about citizenship – where the latter means not just ‘nationality’ qua belonging or juridical affiliation with a particular state and the associated categories of rights, but also a far larger bundle of claims and capacities (juridical, political, economic, cultural) that define a person’s membership and competence inside a society. If all states seek to establish the ‘conceptual, legal, and ideological boundary between citizens and foreigners’, then such distinctions run not only along the external frontiers that surround the territorial sovereignties of national states, but inside and through those societies too (Brubaker 1992, p. x). To grasp how such a boundary and its distinctions can be constructed within the ascribed solidarities of a society and can then work to authorise some claims on belonging and not others, we need to focus on more than simply the law, or even the sociologies of class, gender, and racialisation, but on cultural distinctions of identity, subjectivity, and ‘voice’ too. In other words, citizenship requires a much larger ground of discursive action through

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which the collective identity of the nation becomes imagined and sustained at the level of everyday experience and ordinary life. In other words, this notation of citizenship asks us to consider all of the complicated ways in which the national becomes local and vice versa. Among everything else that they do, British films of the late twentieth century are about who belongs to the nation, and about how that belonging is now to be imagined in Thatcherised Britain’s transformed social landscape and differently structured public sphere.6 In the case of the heritage film, for example, those questions receive a reassuring and non‐threatening series of answers. By their choice of one particular period setting as opposed to others, by their social topographies, by the visual pleasures of rustic scenery and country house settings, by the conscious play of literary reference and broader cultural citation, by evoking a familiar sensibility, by mobilising the past as nostalgia – by all of these mediations of Britishness and its cultural archive, the heritage films restore the efficacy of a conservative and depoliticising version of the national past, freed from any particular trace of democratic or egalitarian critique. The love stories organising the heritage film certainly imply a modernist ideal of personhood, if we take their Bloomsbury referents seriously. But even here they end by sentimentalising the nation rather than defamiliarising or reimagining its claims. By having women at their centre, they do little for a feminist critique of nationalism, as opposed to feminising the nation into feeling. What might a more self‐consciously critical and oppositional representation of the national past using these kinds of materials look like or entail? I argued earlier in this chapter that in the 1980s and the 1990s considerable bodies of filmmaking engaged critically with Thatcherist changes by counterposing the emergent society and its values (materialist, individualising, acquisitive, entrepreneurial, consumerist, amorally pleasure‐seeking) against an older set of traditional virtues ­clustered around community, collectivism, stoicism, dependability, social justice, modesty of expectations, and the importance of fellow feeling and solidarity, ­virtues that were under attack and severely in retreat. Some films told stories in a contemporary setting of the 1980s that directly staged this opposition, as in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, while others reached back into the 1950s for ‘WLNM, the Way of Life that is No More’, as one film critic facetiously called it, thereby seeking to trace the present’s genealogies.7 But however acutely life in the 1980s was being allegorised, such critiques recurred too readily to nostalgia. Only haltingly did some filmmakers begin speaking about society in the present tense rather than continuing to ventriloquise the working class of history. Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives was an exceptionally sharp example while Alan Clark, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh also captured aspects of the emergent society as they entered the 1990s. As the turn of the century neared, new cohorts of directors (e.g. Danny Boyle, Michael Winterbotham, Shane Meadows) trained their eyes on the post‐ Thatcherist landscape of neoliberalism, and the main subject matters and aesthetic changed.



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But how might the resources of earlier histories be mobilised? If the heritage film has appropriated the earlier twentieth century so reliably for its own implicitly conservative purposes, then what other constructions might be possible? How  might the conventionalised and canonical complacencies of ‘heritage’ be ­surpassed, so that ‘Britishness, instead of being a secure, genetic identity, can be seen as something culturally and historically conditioned, always in the making, never made’? (Samuel 1995, p. iv). If we are not to refuse the ground of national identification tout court, that is, how might a new version of democratic and socially generous patriotism be imagined? How might a different set of patriotic modalities be entertained – ones less exclusivist and Anglocentric, less provincial and defensive, but more generous and pluralistic, more continuous with the older post‐1945 ideals of the public good, more animated perhaps by the cultural radicalisms of 1968? Here I return to my opening reflections on the possible forms of the relation of film to history. How can film’s specific modes of historical address, its ways of working on the past, its manner of making history into stories  –  its particular ­historicity  –  help with the writing of history? Of course, there are many more answers than just a single response. But one of commercial cinema’s most familiar impulses – towards histories of ordinary lives beneath the big events, via childhood memoirs, crime reports, melodrama, sex stories, family romance, and so forth – can help vitally in the study of cultural change, particularly for those times when the main public meanings of a culture are being recast and rethought. If we conduct careful readings of particular films and their genres, while combining them with an interpretive approach towards ordinary people’s lives, via both oral histories and surviving written documentation, we might get closer to addressing social ­history’s subjective and experiential dimensions and to tracking concretely the elusive connections between popular culture and politics. Film constructs its own history – not necessarily by the ‘truth’ of its representations or the accuracy of its literal reconstructions, but by finding the means to visualise intimacy, interiority, and everydayness, which are otherwise notoriously resistant to the historian’s eye. Indeed, serious historical work which explores popular experience in that way barely exists. Film gives us the chance to complicate the category of politics, above all by allowing new interconnections between the national and the local to be viewed, where the ‘local’ describes all those quotidian places (family, household, work, schooling, recreation, entertainment, sexuality) so easily removed from the recognised public frames where political meaning is usually assigned. In an earlier essay on the Second World War, I discuss films of very particular ordinary lives in order to revisit the war’s meanings: the young John Boorman in his autobiographical Hope and Glory (1987); the fantasist criminals in Bernard Rose’s Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1989); Janie, the Scottish small farmer’s wife in Another Time, Another Place (Michael Radford, 1983) (Eley 2009). Such films (which may vary in quality from the very good to the really bad) mark out territories that are barely yet being

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mapped by British historians, territories that include childhoods, the dreamworlds of teenagers, the confinements of the geographically remote periphery, provincial landscapes beyond the Home Counties, and parochial lives of all kinds, especially those of women. These are what Carolyn Steedman calls ‘lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don’t quite work’ (1987, p. 5).8 Such lives contained ‘ways of knowing and ways of seeing the world … rarely acknowledged, let  alone celebrated, in the expressions of a ­hegemonic culture’ (Kuhn 1995, p. 8). In these terms, film offers a valuable starting point in three ways. First, it provides a screen for contemporary anxieties and dilemmas, where particular representations and representational repertoires are also specifically produced and shaped: in common with the arts and cultural production more generally, film is both the bearer of its own histories and a bridge to wider societal analysis. Second, it likewise affords access to change across time: by close formal and symptomatic readings, carefully contextualised via the appropriate historical and historiographical analyses for both cinema and society, key shifts in social, cultural, and political history can be exposed and tracked. Finally, the questions assembled by means of these historically contextualised close readings can then be taken back to the periods and themes addressed. If we try to think like this, film can be an invaluable resource – not as a straightforward reflection or literal reconstruction of events, but as an imaginative incitement to argument and thought. To return to one of my main examples once again, the heritage film successfully reinscribes ‘tradition’ as the central good of the national past. But the very same stories might also be retold (or read against the grain) to challenge the conformities of the present  –  through critiques of the family, resistance to sexual repression, subversion of heteronormativity, the queering of sexualities, the claiming of feminist subjectivity, and so forth. As the suppressed source of a more radical conception of personhood, moreover, and a modernism implacably hostile to the congealed normativities of the past, Bloomsbury and similar radical formations could precisely deliver such a counter‐narrative, allowing a different history to be told. It would encourage other structures to be problematised too – from the reproduction of the violence and privileges of class, and the ethnocentrisms of empire, to the general oppressiveness of British traditions, whether in the dominance of London over the regions or the continuity of class inequalities and their privilege. The centrality of privacy, intimacy, and love to the imagining of national wholeness so saturates the representation of the collective in the dominant forms of the heritage film, that it can be hard to see how else mass culture might mobilise history’s radical alterity in contemporary Britain. For that purpose we will need very different constructions of British heritage. Rather than naturalising the past via the reassuring pleasures of familiar repetition, bringing us back to the comforting pathways of the already known, the archive might then be drawn upon to unsettle the given forms of understanding and make them strange. If the ­routines of national history can become the occasion for fantasy, distortion, and



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misrecognition in a more critical filmmaking practice, then the resulting stories might delaminate nostalgia from the nation. Britishness might be radically remapped, as a landscape where it might become possible to imagine change.9

Notes 1 The ‘cinema and society’ tradition has been associated, in particular, with Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, each the author and editor of a great many books. Richards made his earliest foray into cinema history in 1973 with Visions of Yesterday, followed by a long string of further books that included The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (1984) and Films and British National Identity (1997). In addition to Aldgate’s own work on aspects of cinema, public culture, and censorship between the 1930s and the late twentieth century, Richards and Aldgate also co‐authored books together, namely, The Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (1983) and Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (1986). ‘Cinema and Society’ is also the title of a series of books under the general editorship of Richards and published by Routledge. For a discussion of these volumes, see Hill (1990). 2 These illustrations are necessarily extremely partial, markers for more elaborate discussions. While others have made powerful once‐off contributions – e.g. Oldman with Nil by Mouth, Tim Roth with The War Zone (1999), Kevin Allen with Twin Town (1997) – Shane Meadows seems the strongest successor to the earlier ‘social realists’ Clarke, Loach, and Leigh. After Small Time (1996), Meadows’ earlier films included Twenty‐Four Seven (1997), A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002). For discussions of the realist tradition, see Hill (2000) and also Monk (2000), who includes Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) and The Full Monty (1997) in her category, though these have far stronger affinities with the earlier evocations of iconic working‐class masculinity, figuring a transitional ambivalence. To them we may add Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000). 3 There is now a substantial literature on the British ‘heritage film’ including Higson’s subsequent book, English Heritage, English Cinema (2003), Claire Monk’s Heritage Film Audiences (2011), and John Hill’s discussion of ‘Representations of the Past’ in his British Cinema in the 1980s (1999). 4 By both period setting and cultural valencies, the various Jane Austen adaptations signify very differently (beginning appropriately enough just as the ‘core’ heritage cycle was ending). See Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995); Persuasion (Roger Michell, 1995); Emma (Douglas McGrath, 1996); Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999); Pride and Prejudice ( Joe Wright, 2005). Concurrent TV serialisations have included Pride and Prejudice (Simon Langton, 1995), Emma (Diarmuid Lawrence, 1997), and an earlier cycle comprising Pride and Prejudice (Cyril Coke, 1980); Sense and Sensibility (Rodney Bennett, 1981); Mansfield Park (David Giles, 1983); and Northanger Abbey (Giles Foster, 1986). By the later 1990s, British costume dramas, extending across all manner of cinema and TV genres from romance to mystery, were becoming rampant. My understanding of the heritage film is in these terms highly specific to the years roughly 1981–1995, i.e. to the particular transitional time we call in shorthand ‘Thatcherism’. An entirely different analysis would be required for the subsequent years, one version

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of which might run from Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001) to Downton Abbey (various directors, created by Julian Fellowes, 2010–2015). For a fuller treatment, see Eley (2009). The slippage here from ‘Britishness’ to ‘Englishness’ on my part is deliberate. Despite devolution, the growth of sub‐nationalisms, some ‘provincialising of England’, and the incomplete multiculturalising of the UK, confusions continue to beset this distinction in contemporary politics and culture, where Anglocentrism remains hardly less powerful than whiteness in the discursive and institutional machineries of British national identification. On this, see Andrews (1996), Colls and Dodd (1986) and Colls (2002). In my usage here ‘citizenship’ implies more than a bundle of juridical rights and also signifies a set of civic capacities, to be used in public ways, within a wider notion of political agency. The coinage ‘WLNM’ was Anne Billson’s, in her New Statesman review of Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992). A key referent for the idea of the ‘borderlands’ is the work of Raymond Williams, ­especially The Country and the City (1973) and his first novel Border Country (1960). As markers for this more radical re‐historicising, which uses the literary heritage of the national past for critical rather than merely affirmative purposes, we might cite Sally Potter’s Orlando (1993), Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), or Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995), whose retellings deliberately redesign the national stage – sometimes playfully, sometimes with dystopic bleakness and rage. So far, such examples remain few and far between.

References Andrews, Leighton (1996). New Labour, new England? In: The Blair Agenda (ed. Mark Perryman), 125–146. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Billson, Anne (1992). Review of The Long Day Closes (1992), New Statesman and Society, 22 May. Brubaker, Rogers (1992). Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Colls, Robert (2002). Identity of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip (1986). Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920. London: Croom Helm. Eley, Geoff (1995). Distant Voices, Still Lives. The family is a dangerous place: memory, gender, and the image of the working class. In: Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (ed. Robert A Rosenstone), 17–42. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eley, Geoff (2009). How is the national past imagined? National sentimentality, true feeling, and the “heritage film”, 1980–1995. In: Gender, Labour, War, and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (ed. Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel), 238–255. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Higson, Andrew (1993). Re‐presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film. In: British Cinema and Thatcherism (ed. Lester Friedman), 109–129. London: UCL Press.



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Hill, John (1990). “Cinema and society”. (Review article). Screen 31 (2): 223–230. Hill, John (2000). From the New Wave to “Brit‐Grit”: continuity and difference in working‐ class realism. In: British Cinema, Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson), 249–260. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Annette (1995). Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Malik, Sarita (1996). Beyond “The cinema of duty”? The pleasures of hybridity: black British film of the 1980s and 1990s. In: Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 202–215. London: Cassell. Monk, Claire (2000). Underbelly UK: the 1990s underclass film, masculinity, and the ideologies of “New” Britain. In: British Cinema, Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson), 274–287. London: Routledge. Rosenstone, Robert A. (ed.) (1995a). Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. (1995b). Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Samuel, Raphael (1995). British dimensions: “four nations history”. History Workshop Journal 40 (Autumn): iv. Schwartz, Vanessa (1998). Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin‐de‐Siècle Paris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Singer, Ben (2001). Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. Sklar, Robert and Musser, Charles (eds.) (1990). Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Steedman, Carolyn Kay (1987). Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wollen, Tana (1991). Over Our Shoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s. In: Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (ed. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey), 178–193. London: Routledge.

Part II

Critical Approaches Debating Film Texts

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Filming with Words British Cinema, Literature and Adaptation Christine Geraghty

In 2014, British film writer and producer Norman Spencer was asked about his collaboration with David Lean on Hobson’s Choice (1954). He recalled how when they’d finished a film, ‘We’d always want to make another right away. We’d haunt bookshops and he’d say: “Within nine feet of us is a wonderful idea for a film”’ (2014). Lean was indeed a great one for adaptations but a reliance on literature as a source (novels in particular but also plays and short stories), while widely ­recognised as a distinctive feature of British cinema, has not always been seen so positively by critics. ‘There is something wrong’, Sight and Sound opined of the British New Wave films in 1962 ‘with an industry which thinks so consistently in terms of adaptation’ (Anon. 1962, p. 55) and the sentiment persists. In this chapter, I will look at this rather ambivalent attitude and unpick some of the problems caused by a negative emphasis on the debt owed to adaptations by British cinema.1 I will argue that adaption has been fundamental to mainstream cinema and that the time may have come to accept British cinema as an example of what André Bazin rather unusually welcomed as ‘mixed cinema’ (1971). Evidence of how adaptations have come to define British cinema can be seen in a number of lists which provide a brief snapshot. In 1999, for example, the British Film Institute produced a list of the 100 best British films of the century, as voted for by 1000 leading figures of the movie industry (British Film Institute 1999). All of the top 10 and 60 out of the 100 films in the list cited some kind of literary source.2 Routledge’s more academic Fifty Key British Films included 22 adaptations, despite listing only three adaptations between 1980 and 2004 (Barrow and White 2008). Research for the UK Film Council in 2008 on the cultural impact of British

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film tested out the frequent claim that ‘British cinema had depended heavily on literary adaptations and has therefore been subordinated to a dominant national literary canon’. Researchers found their samples ‘support this belief, showing approximately 50% of films as adaptations’ (Narval Media et al. 2009, p. 20). And, while most of the films cited in these lists were post‐Second World War, Hitchcock’s 19 adaptations between 1926 and 1939 indicate the importance of literary sources to pre‐war British cinema. The history of British cinema as a literary cinema was traced out by Brian McFarlane in Charles Barr’s important 1986 collection, All Our Yesterdays. McFarlane is an Australian and a respected figure in both British Film Studies and Adaptation Studies. I have chosen to return to his work at various points in this chapter because, over the years, he has developed a sympathetic but critical account of the relationship between British cinema and literature which raises issues which ­nevertheless need further discussion if we are to move the topic forward. His essay, ‘A Literary Cinema?’, gives a résumé of the history of adaptations in British cinema, starting with the silent period when approaches and genres were laid down which survived into later periods. He identifies the sub‐genres of ­adaptations in the silent period: the classics, the thrillers, the empire‐boosters, the upper‐middle‐brow novel (what we might now call the literary novel), the regional story, and the popular best‐seller. The later 1930s saw the emphasis on popular novels rather than classics while ‘literary adaptation was at its lowest ebb in British cinema in the war years’ (McFarlane 1986, p. 132). Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) unleashed a literary cinema boom with Powell and Pressburger and Carol Reed among those looking to literary sources in the late 1940s. In suggesting that this period confirmed British cinema as a literary cinema, McFarlane also indicates the problems that surround that term. In the 1940s films of Reed and Lean, his favoured directors working at the height of their powers, he discerns the ‘respectful approach to respectable literary sources which has always found favour with the British critical establishment’ (McFarlane 1986, p. 133). The tendency to define British cinema as literary was ‘due as much to the kind of adaptation as the number’ with British adaptations characterised by ‘a decorous, dogged fidelity to their sources’ (McFarlane 1986, p. 120). For McFarlane, Britain’s literary cinema needs to be given backbone by something else. For this, he turns to the realist explosion of the British New Wave which found inspiration in contemporary novels and plays; ‘at no other period in British film‐making has there been so close a congruence between ­contemporary film and literature’ (1986, p. 139) says McFarlane, and both could claim popular as well as critical success. He praises their ‘unobtrusive but insistent evocation of time and place’ (McFarlane 1986, p. 138) and their ­ ­commitment, shared with their sources, to the representation of a ‘particular class and region’ (1986, p. 140). Because of their realism, McFarlane argues that British New Wave films ‘marked a distinct break with the discreet, “tasteful” ­tradition of British film adaptations’ (1986, p. 140).



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Writing in the mid‐1980s, McFarlane was unaware of the next explosion in British cinema’s love affair with adaptations. He records that ‘the 1970s and the early 1980s, in their floundering search for audiences, have dabbled in most of the literary sub‐genres established in the silent period’ (1986, p. 140), notes the failure of Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and the growing success of ­franchises based on the novels of Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie. It was too early for him to tell that the early 1980s would be remembered for the emergence of what came to be critically described as ‘the heritage film’, a genre defined as ­covering ‘films made in the 1980s and 1990s that either depict some aspect of the English past before the Second World War or are adapted from a canonical English literary text’ (Higson 2003, p. 10).3 The genre was kickstarted in 1981 by a film that was not an adaptation, Chariots of Fire, and a television programme that was not a film, Brideshead Revisited. This is a useful reminder that the heritage film is not ­confined to adaptations and that television played a crucial role in establishing what we understand by heritage cinema. Nevertheless, it was significant that 95 of the 125 films in the filmography of Higson’s English Heritage, English Cinema (2011) were adaptations of some kind from a literary source and it is not surprising that, by the 2000s, adaptation in British cinema had come to be almost synonymous with the heritage film. The heritage film was characterised by a visual style which was less narratively motived than Hollywood’s. The films’ ‘rich and spectacular visual qualities, their pictorialist use of the image’ (Higson 2011, p. 110) drew attention to images which invite the audience to take self‐conscious pleasure in visual spectacle. At the same time, the viewer is invited to look through the shot to what is being displayed – the house, the gardens, the furniture as well as the costumed actors. A space is created for the ‘display of heritage properties rather than for the ­enactment of dramas’ (Higson 2003, p. 39). This emphasis on display has remained even though other elements have changed with the emergence in the 1990s of the term ‘post‐heritage’ cinema and a ‘fissuring and a fracturing in the monolith of heritage’ (Church Gibson 2000, p. 116). Alongside this, the prescience of My Son the Fanatic (1997) and the success of East Is East (1999) showed that ­nineteenth‐century novels and white faces were not compulsory components of a British adaptation while Morven Caller (2002) and Young Adam (2003) were examples of young Scottish directors engaging with post‐Second World War novels. Nevertheless, what we might call mainstream heritage film still persists. Thus, Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 Jane Eyre was praised for its visual pleasures, its performances and its careful reworking of the book but there were those who thought it played too safe. Peter Bradshaw suggested that this ‘new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is enclosed in a crinoline of intelligent good taste’ (2011) and Geoffrey Macnab regretted that it sometimes ‘seems we are watching just another well‐mannered BBC costume drama’ (2011a, p. 68).This approach, which accords with McFarlane’s tasteful tradition of adaptation, seemed to pay off though in terms of finding an audience already attuned to the genre. Jane Eyre was financially more successful

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than Andrea Arnold’s more controversial Wuthering Heights in the same year and it seemed that ‘the price of taking such an irreverent approach to the source text is that the “ready‐made” target audience of the more faithful adaptations is ­sacrificed’ (Galpin 2014, p. 97). The dismissive references of Bradshaw and Macnab to crinolines, costume, good taste, and good manners are indicative of the way that critical responses to adaptations are shaped by assumptions about the heritage approach. Indeed, Macnab confesses that ‘there is something disheartening about a film‐maker as adventurous as Andrea Arnold turning toward Victorian fiction for inspiration’ (2011b). Even McFarlane (with Deane Williams) uses the stereotype of the heritage film when he praises Michael Winterbottom for avoiding its clichés in Jude the Obscure (1996): ‘There is nothing decorous about his approach to the classics of the English literature; his films are not examples of starry casts comporting before listed buildings’ (McFarlane and Deane 2009, p. 48). The slippage that takes place between the heritage film and adaptations generally can be seen in James Leggott’s account of British cinema of the 2000s: ‘British cinema’s reliance upon the nation’s literary and theatrical heritage … has been perceived both as a signifier of quality and as an impediment to the development of a cinematic culture’, he suggests before moving on to argue that this has led to ‘a national cinematic tradition that is, for the most part, stolidly dialogue‐driven and literal‐minded’ (Leggott 2008, p. 29) and contributes to the ‘tasteful middle‐brow core of British cinema’ (2008, p. 49) in which crinolines and bonnets undoubtedly feature. The long engagement of British cinema with adaptations and its culmination in the mainstream heritage film tends to disguise the fact that other cinemas ­similarly look to literary sources for inspiration. Cartmell and Whelehan remind us that the ‘literature/screen nexus … is as old as the development of narrative cinema’ (2010, p. 22). Timothy Corrigan’s account of ‘film and literature’ traces out a history of Hollywood by studying this relationship. It takes him from ‘the immediate ­appearance of literary subjects’ (2012, p. 13) in early US cinema through the drawing together of film and literature with the consolidation of sound in the 1930s when ‘literary sources became rich foundations for ­experimentation and development’ (2012, p. 23). The 1940 and 1950s saw a shift to popular fiction as a source while Hollywood films from the 1960s through the 1980s ‘continue their imperative to transform big literature into big spectacles’ (2012, p. 36). Corrigan notes also the return to the classics in the 1980s, r­ ecognising the impact of British heritage cinema, and comments on how, in the 2000s, adaptations of fantasy literature including graphic novels and comics have ­ become dominant. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising to note that the American Film Institute’s (1998) list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time had similar figures to the BFI for films citing some kind of literary source – 8 out of the top 10 and 60 out of the 100 films chosen. This history of the relationship between film and literature in Hollywood ­f ilmmaking, however cursory, is necessary in order to break out of the assumption



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Figure 8.1  A definitive version? David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948).

that British cinema’s relationship with adaptations is unique. But it is important also because this shared leaning towards adaptation is one of the ways in which Hollywood filmmaking intertwines with Britain’s national cinema. Thus, it is Hollywood which has produced some of the most distinctive versions of British classics, versions which then act as a source for subsequent adaptations. Lean may have produced the definitive version of Oliver Twist (1948) (Figure 8.1), so that later adaptors followed his cuts, characterisations, and mise‐en‐scène but it was the prestige pictures of MGM  –  David Copperfield (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), Pride and Prejudice (1940) – which provided the template for subsequent ­adaptations of these classic novels. And it was the Hollywood versions of Dracula and Frankenstein which provided the imagery and tropes which ensured that the ­horror genre would remember, one way or another, its roots in adaptations of nineteenth‐century British/Irish novels. The heritage film offers an extreme example of this intertwining between US and British cinemas as what was taken to be a distinctive national genre morphed into an internationally recognisable set of stories and mise‐en‐scènes. By the 2000s, Higson notes, ‘English literary cinema’ was ‘a global phenomenon, rather than a specifically national cultural practice’ (2011, p. 101). Jane Austen with her box‐office combination of good manners and romance was now more likely to be adapted in a ‘carefully engineered Anglo‐Hollywood crossover film’ (Higson 2011, p. 153).

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A version of British national identity which had been highly contested in its own home was taken out of context and given an even glossier sheen: The British heritage film has been colonised by Hollywood not only in terms of financial backing and talent, but in terms of the way in which it has affected the ­evolution of the genre into a commodity that can be sold to mainstream America. ( Jeffers 2006, p. 45)

If British cinema wanted to sell in US markets, it had to adopt the versions of British national identity which Hollywood itself had absorbed and re‐presented. American critic Jennifer Jeffers suggests that ‘the fact that Britain reterritorializes itself in the image of an American film‐set on location in Britain is disconcerting’ (2006, p. 233). Disconcerting perhaps but not surprising. Nor was it surprising that Andrea Arnold’s less than tractable Wuthering Heights was not distributed in the US. Heritage cinema tends to trade on the fact of adaptation, drawing attention to the original source in a classic novel. As John Hill notes, however, there is less emphasis on faithfulness to the original source than on ‘fidelity to the popular idea of “great literature” or literary worthiness’ (1999, p. 78). Other films based on ­children’s literature or literary prize‐winners may also use literary origins as a way of marketing the film. Faithfulness to the original is not, however, the only or even the most pertinent method of evaluation and a film’s origin in a literary source does not determine the way it is received. In some cases, such as the Harry Potter adaptations, the films’ core audience is likely to be viewing the film in relationship to the books. But the reference point for a much‐adapted classic novel, such as Wuthering Heights, may well be the previous screen versions rather than Brontë’s original. Adaptations of prize‐winning literary novels will be seen by many who have not read the original and again faithfulness to the source is less important than that sense of dealing with contemporary topics in an artistic way by an established auteur which marks films like Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011).4 An interesting example of how faithfulness can be subverted in more ways than one is offered by Sue Harper’s reading of the 1940s Gainsborough melodramas, based on popular novels of the day. Paying unusual attention to the adaptation of popular fiction, Harper argues that while the ‘original novels had addressed a m ­ iddle‐class readership conceived as equals of their authors’ (1994, p. 125), the Gainsborough scriptwriters, who despised the ‘mass‐culture factory’ of the studio system, ‘took refuge in a rhetoric of disdain towards their working‐class female audience’ (1994, p. 126). And so the scripts sharpen the distinctions between classes, making the aristocracy ‘a site of fascination, fear and unspeakable dark sexuality’ and conceiving ‘marginal groups … as a social threat’ (1994, p. 126). In turn, though, the scripts were turned upside down by the visual adaptation of the h ­ istorical setting and costume which created the ‘past as a site of physical pleasure’ (1994, p. 129) and celebrated the sexual breaching of class boundaries with a ‘­sublime excess’ (1994, p. 126) absent



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from the novels and unintended by the scriptwriters. Films  like The Wicked Lady (1945) and Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) remind us that filmmakers need not feel a requirement to be faithful even to the so‐called spirit of the original, that script and film are different entities and that the work of adaptation often involves a re‐positioning of elements for a­ udiences who have no need to have read the book. Freed of the knee‐jerk demands of faithfulness, the Gainsborough melodramas remind us also that adaptations do not just have associations with other adaptions but seek connections elsewhere. Generic features mark adaptations and non‐adaptations alike and the inter‐twining of adaptation with genre is so strong that Cartmell and Whelehan have argued that ‘genrification’ (2010, p. 97) is a part of the adaptation process for makers and audiences. Thus, Harper discusses the Gainsborough ­adaptations in the broader context of British costume films, a categorisation which crosses over with the historical film and falls into groupings or sub‐genres such as the biopic, the classic adaptation, the historical horror film and the imperial ­adventure film, only some of which will have a basis in a literary source. The costume film might seem a natural fit with the adaptation mode but adaptations are also a feature of other genres, though that fact is not always given much weight by film historians and theorists. In British cinema, this would include genres like science fiction, horror, the war film, and cross‐categories like the cult film. Genrification provides a narrative framework to support the transferred story, ­iconography for the visual rendering of descriptive passages, and generic expectations for audiences not attracted by the adaptation tag. While, as I have explored elsewhere (Geraghty 2008), the romance narrative and the charged binaries associated with melodrama have made literary critics of film adaptations somewhat queasy, the interaction of melodrama and realism in British cinema provides a productive context for tracing out the generic influences in British adaptations. Adaptations make connections with genres but they also make connections with other cinemas. Dianne Sadoff argues that ‘heritage film morphs, travels and productively forces us to imagine ourselves in different but not unrelated historical dilemmas and difficulties’ (2010, p. xxii) and one consequence is that classic ­literature is seen through other eyes. Titles from Scottish literature were bought up by Hollywood to such an extent in the 1950s that the novels of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson were the legal property of US studios with Rob Roy (1953), The Master of Ballantrae (1953) and Kidnapped (1960) being among the results (Harper 2009, p. 277). English literature provides sources for directors from elsewhere to make films in the UK: an American resident in Britain, Stanley Kubrick adapted Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon for Warner Brothers; Australian and British funding supported New Zealander, Jane Campion, who references Andrew Motion’s (1997) biography of John Keats in the credits of Bright Star (2009), the story of his love affair with Fanny Brawne. And British source material travels widely. A list of 25 screen versions of Wuthering Heights includes versions from Mexico, Japan, Italy, India, the Philippines, France, and Turkey (Shachar 2012, pp.  205–206), all made outside the UK and hardly seen by British audiences.

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The impact of postcolonialism can also be seen in the interaction between d­ ifferent cinematic traditions in classic adaptations: Gurinder Chadha gave her 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice – Bride and Prejudice – an Indian star and an Indian setting; Mira Nair placed a US star in a British cast and filmed in Rajasthan as well as England for Vanity Fair (2004); and the Tamil film industry provides revealing and playful versions of European classics including an updated version of Sense and Sensibility, Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000). Ginette Vincendeau (2001) and others have shown how the British heritage film has its equivalents in other European national cinemas while Belén Vidal has explored the possibility of a pan‐European heritage film, citing adaptations such as Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003). Far from keeping us within national borders, literary adaptations invite us to cross boundaries even if the compromises of co‐production do not always make the journey invigorating. Adaptations also make for connections between authors/auteurs and even fights for control (Elliott 2012). Of course, many film adaptations are hardly recognised as such when the fact of an adaptation of a relatively unknown book is not registered in the film or its selling. But where the author is well known, then the adaptation raises questions about ownership and authorship. Any adaptation of a Dickens’ novel is likely to acknowledge his authorship even while director and scriptwriter claim to be making a new and contemporary version. Living authors may get involved in adaption of their own work and the recent vogue for films based on the lives of authors both acknowledges their status and seeks to shape their stories for film. But the original authorship may slip away as the fact of adaptation becomes more tenuous; James Bond gets loose from his source in Ian Fleming’s authorship as different stars, directors, and producers add their take on the character. In critical assessments of British genre films, it is relatively rare for literary authorship to be given much recognition in assessing adaptation but ­sometimes one can see how the original author/source does become a point of contention for director and critics. The British crime film, Get Carter (1971) offers an example of this kind of interaction. Discussing the film in 1997, director Mike Hodges refers to the original novels by Ted Lewis (though he does not actually name the source novel, Jack’s Return Home [1971]) but he adds other influences such as previous British crime films and American films, ‘the best films in that genre without a doubt’ (Hodges 1999, p. 120). He emphasises too that he added something new to the novel: ‘I came across this [true] story of the murder of a man outside a nightclub … and I began to investigate what had happened’ (1999, p. 119). Hodges thus has to acknowledge the fact of adaptation but wants to claim the story as his own. Rather unusually though, critic Robert Murphy pays attention to the literary source, revealing how the rights to the novel were bought by the producer before publication and placing Lewis within a British tradition of regional authenticity and low‐life crime. He explains that ‘Lewis was eager to help out with the script but Hodges wanted to write his own adaptation’ (Murphy 1999, p. 125) and d­ iscusses some of the differences between the novel and the film.



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This small example is emblematic not so much of the commercial questions of ownership and rights which adaptations undoubtedly open up but of the less specific tussles at the level of authorial ownership and recognition which take place in the interviews, advertising, and DVD extras which accompany a film’s release. The involvement of novelists, along with playwrights, theatre directors, and even poets, is a feature of British cinema noted by Jefferson Hunter and is matched, he argues, by ‘the literariness of prominent English filmmakers’ (2010, p. 281). Hunter’s complex and fascinating book examines the strong interrelatedness b­ etween English literature and English film (and television) through case studies of collaborations and entanglements which have roots in English culture more ­generally. The one‐way movement of adaptation – from literature to film – becomes a two‐way process; ‘if English cinema has for long been engaged in a back‐ and‐forth with English ­literature, it is so in part because of the bookish twentieth‐century society the cinema reflects’ (Hunter 2010, p. 13).This allows him to range much more freely across a national cinema which might be called literary not just because of the eagerness of cinema to ‘ransack published fiction for usable stories’ (2010, p. 157) but also because of the way books and writers can be seen on screen. While Hunter pays due attention to the adaptation of classics and the heritage films, his willingness to view films and books as part of a whole culture also pays dividends with less obvious material. In a search for the English crime film, Hunter discusses the novel, It Always Rains on Sunday (1945), one of the ‘sociology‐of‐crime’ novels which ‘had a vogue’ in the late thirties and into the forties. The author, Arthur La Bern, ‘dispatches his characters to their predetermined fates’ but he ‘sends them in no particular hurry, not without creating, in the best pages of the book, a well detailed portrait of street life’ (Hunter 2010, p. 120). Hunter takes the novel’s sense of fate, its unhurried treatment and the everydayness of the setting into a discussion of English crime films which emphasises ‘how inextricably urban proletarian life is bound up with petty lawbreaking, and then, perhaps serious crime’ (2010, p. 121). There is a melancholy ordinariness at stake, in book and film, a counterpointing of worlds. Domestic life is not just a contrast to the glamour of crime; it is ‘a causative factor, a measure of victimisation, a source of feeling; part of the story’ (2010, p. 127). Hunter’s account opens up the concept of literary cinema in various ways. In particular, it allows for it to encompass those films in which books feature as part of everyday life. Brief Encounter is thus an example of literary cinema not so much because it has origins in a Noël Coward play but because its heroine’s pleasure in reading a certain kind of fiction gives us a way of understanding her and the tone and themes of the film; as Richard Dyer says, ‘the film speaks the same language as the novels Laura would read’ (1993, p. 39). More broadly, Hunter’s analysis of the entanglements of English film gives a more positive spin to those cross‐overs between media which are often seen as a problem in adaptations. McFarlane praises Michael Winterbottom for his capacity to draw on the novels he adapts as ‘raw material which he transmutes into

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cinematic texts’ (McFarlane 2009, p. 62). The power is with the filmmaker. This emphasis on the cinematic will seem self‐evidently correct to many readers but if Hunter is right and exchanges between media (rather than domination by one) are possible, then we might be more generous to the mix of media evident in many British adaptations. This can be found, for instance, in settings; the creation of expressive rooms as spaces for action by characters in A Taste of Honey (1963) and The Knack (1965) owes much to the films’ theatrical origins. It may be found in the use of the written word; acts of writing (and not writing) impel the narration of Bright Star and fragments of handwritten letters, notes, and poetry are seen as well as read aloud. It may be found in the performance style of many British actors whose theatrical training and work on television have given them a different way of taking on and expressing character. It may be found in the pictorial qualities of the image which could be explored further through making connections with ­different traditions of British painting. British director Joe Wright has created a series of well‐received films by working with the multi‐mediality of adaptations. The most traditional is Pride and Prejudice (2005), which opens with Elizabeth Bennet walking along, reading a book; she closes the book and the camera continues with her as she walks towards the house. The camera then takes a different route and enters the house as if picturing for us what the book itself has conjured up. After travelling through the untidy and lived‐in rooms, the camera joins Elizabeth again and the story starts with her overhearing Mrs Bennet’s news about Netherfield. It is an opening which both refers to the act of reading and shows off the accomplishment of cinema in providing the moving images to give the pages life. The first shots of Atonement (2007) privilege the act of writing as, accompanied by the percussion sounds of the typewriter, the underlined letters of the word ATONEMENT are typed on to the screen; it is an i­ ndication that throughout the film the close‐ups of words being written/typed will give force to the film’s concern with the shattering effects of language. Atonement (2007) also references a wide variety of other media from opera to newsreels, theatre to film classics, and Anna Karenina (2012), Wright’s third adaptation (out of four features up to this point), strikingly reworks the novel into a cinematic rendering of the theatre (Figure 8.2). The action starts with the rise of the curtain and continues with scenes situated all over the theatre with actors wandering up to the flies and into the stalls. Drawing rooms and kitchens are sited backstage, the stalls become a dance floor or an office full of choreographed clerks; even the pivotal horse race takes place, with a real horse, in the theatre. These films exemplify Hunter’s point about the way in which novelists and playwrights engage with cinema (their scripts were written by Deborah Moggach, Christopher Hampton, and Tom Stoppard respectively) and they signal their status as adaptations by the prominent referencing of other media, some of which challenge cinema’s dominance. Welcoming this mix of media involves dropping some of the ‘prejudicial assumptions’ (Hunter 2010, p. 9) which cling to adaptations and to British ­adaptations, in particular. The determination to view and study film as separate



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Figure 8.2  ‘A cinematic rendering of the theatre’: Anna Karenina (2012).

from literature and theatre and to insist on the particular properties which ­establish film as a distinctive medium has led, Hunter argues, to ‘condemnations of this or that English film, or possibly even the whole of English cinema, for being word‐driven, “literate”, derived from some written source which has left its anti‐visual (and “elitist”) traces on the screen’ (2010, pp. 9–10). This emphasis on being ‘word‐driven’ chimes with another article by McFarlane, this time a review of British cinema of the 1990s. Here, he argues that many ­features which had distinguished British cinema in the mid‐century are still evident in the 1990s, in particular ‘the persistence of the literary and the realist as the ­identifying otherness of British cinema’ (McFarlane 2009, pp. 366–367). Now though he extends the argument beyond adaptations or indeed literariness into a ‘regard for the verbal’ (2009, p. 367). Writing of Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) and Secrets and Lies (1996), McFarlane comments that ‘it is hard to think of equivalent US films which place so much reliance on the verbal at the expense of the more obviously “cinematic” qualities of mise‐en‐scène and editing’ (2009, p. 367). Of Enduring Love (2004), he writes that ‘this is a film, like many a British film, adaptation or not, in which talk matters’ (2009, p. 368). McFarlane seems to be responding to the question mark of his 1986 essay title (‘A literary cinema?’) with a slightly ­different version – a verbal cinema. McFarlane is, as always, judiciously fair‐minded and tactful in this account but it is not too far from here to Leggott’s description of ‘a national cinematic ­tradition that is … stolidly dialogue‐driven and literal‐minded’ (Leggott 2010, p. 31). Although McFarlane seems to be trying to avoid the slide in much of the essay, it is so easy to slip into a binary in which the verbal is set in opposition to and at the expense of ‘cinematic’ qualities of mise‐en‐scène and editing. It is no accident that this binary, so detrimental to British cinema, arises in this discussion of film and literature for, as Thomas Leitch has argued, the axiom that ‘literary texts are verbal, films visual’ (2003, p. 153) is one of the great fallacies of adaptation. The  process of adaptation is, it is said, one of turning ‘Word into

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Image’ as an influential American Film Foundation documentary on s­ creenwriters was ­entitled. Aspiring screen writers are told that ‘Movies are about pictures, not about words’ (The Writers’ Workshop 2014). David Mamet is quoted as saying that ‘the perfect movie doesn’t have any dialogue. So you should always be s­ triving to make a silent film’ (Kozloff 2000, p. 8), and British adaptation specialist Andrew Davies similarly advises, ‘Never use a line of dialogue if you can achieve the effect with a look’ (2011). Such attitudes are rooted in a notion of medium specificity with the image track as the defining feature of all cinemas. But the hostility to words is a particular problem for British cinema if it is, as McFarlane’s analysis indicates, a verbal cinema with its roots in the habits of adaptation. If the best films are silent, then words (in the form of speech and writing) are an admission of failure in adaptation, a sign that the filmmakers have not found ­adequate images to act as the equivalence for the original. So the lack is covered up by words  –  intertitles in silent films, dialogue, and other forms of speech when sound arrives. But to see words as an optional (and undesirable) add‐on for cinema is surely to deny that cinema can often work best when words, sound, and image are intertwined into what adaptation theorist Robert Stam calls ‘the audio‐visual‐kinetic‐performative energy of the [cinematic] adaptation’ (2004, p. 46). Two British examples from one of the most reviled use of words in film, the voice‐over, illustrate this. The voice‐over is generally consider to be a lazy form of adaptation, using words to communicate what is going on in a ­character’s head or to jump over ellipses in time. But the question surely is not a general one about methods of adaption but a specific one about how well and how differently the act of combining spoken words and images works in any particular example. Consider, for instance, how gently Laura’s voice‐over is established as a plea to her husband in Brief Encounter, voiced in her breathing of her husband’s name after the long introduction of the buffet scene and the train journey home. After the dominating high‐pitched chatter of Dolly’s monologue (‘She talked and talked until I wanted to throttle her’), Laura’s speaking comes as a relief. The melancholy fall of her voice, its tendency to fade, and to question its right to speak are an integral contribution to the film’s tone of suppression and regret. And it is interesting to note that for the actress the voice‐over was not an easy option. The film regularly offered long close‐ups of Laura’s face and aligning face and voice was taxing: ‘You need to be a star of the silent screen really because there’s such a lot of stuff with commentary over it. It’s terribly difficult’ ( Johnson 2008). Compare that with the opening of Trainspotting (1996). For Danny Boyle, a film and theatre director who, like Lean, consistently looks to adaptations, the voice‐over is not a way of making things easy for the ­audience: ‘the one in Trainspotting is a litany and you’re c­ hallenging the a­ udience to keep up. Either you really go for it or you don’t do one at all’ (2013, p. 161). From the start, voice, music, and images work together to blast the audience along. ‘Choose life’ the male voice demands in its Edinburgh dialect but as we listen we know that he, and we, are not at this moment going to choose the life



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described, the life of ‘compact disc players and electric tin‐openers’. As the chase continues, the images sometimes illustrate the voice‐over, sometimes lead it on but it’s important also that the counterpoint is not simply between images and words but within the voice‐over itself, as the ­sardonic irony opens up a gap between words and voice. These are very different voice‐overs with very different sources and influences at play in their use of l­ anguage. Each of them establishes not just the tone of the film but also its pace and rhythm. The verbal track does not impose itself over the image track, providing information which would otherwise be lacking. Together, words, image, and indeed music create meaning, engage the audience, and give cinematic pleasure. Talk matters, as McFarlane says, but not at the expense of camera work and mise‐en‐scène but in a relationship with them – counterpointing, endorsing, underlining, dominating. It is very hard to see why British cinema should deny itself this taste for words. Defining national cinemas inevitably involves identifying and working with some characteristics and playing down others. As McFarlane and Hunter indicate, an emphasis on adaptation, and a distinctive approach to literature, have helped to define British cinema and to sell it elsewhere. This approach has picked out certain cultural and political aspects so that a particular version of Britishness comes to stand for the whole. As we have seen, adaptation is a practice of cinema generally, but the reputation of British cinema for literariness rests upon a relatively restricted notion of what constitutes an adaptation. At its most extreme, the association of adaptation with heritage cinema’s emphasis on classic adaptations has had the effect of creating a brand which sometimes presents a very peculiar version of British national identity to the world. This need not, however, be the inevitable result of an association between film and literature. It is possible for adaptations to generate more open connections  –  with popular as well as classic fiction, with different genres, with other national cinemas, with other media – and to invite audiences to make creative comparisons and take pleasure in different versions in different media. Accepting adaptation as normal, particularly in a screen culture marked by ­convergence and intertextuality, helps us to stop using the fact of adaptation as means of an evaluation whereby a film (and a national cinema) are automatically dismissed as derivative or welcomed as classic. The intertwining of British cinema, literature and adaptation is both a fact and a stepping stone for analysis.

Notes 1 This chapter is concerned only with cinema and so does not refer to adaptions made as serial drama for British television. The complex relationship between British cinema and British television since the 1980s is discussed elsewhere in this volume. 2 The boundaries of adaptations are blurred, as are those of literature. In this chapter, I have included adaptations of named novels, plays, and biographies but not general ­histories or musicals.

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3 Writers in this field oscillate between talking about British cinema and English cinema and I have not had space to consider the implications of this. The heritage film tends to be discussed as a genre of English cinema but the overall argument made here is not that specific. 4 See Murray (2012) for a discussion of the interaction between the processes of literary prize‐winning and adaptation.

References American Film Institute. (1998). ‘AFI’s 100 greatest American movies of all time’. Available at: http://www.afi.com/100years/movies.aspx (accessed 9 September 2014). Anon. (1962). The front page. Sight & Sound 31 (2): 55. Barrow, Sarah and White, John (2008). Fifty Key British Films. London: Routledge. Bazin, André (1971). In defense of mixed cinema. In: What is Cinema? (trans. and ed. Hugh Gray), 53–75. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. BFI. (1999). ‘The BFI 100’. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls000050201 (accessed 9 September 2014). Boyle, Danny (2013). Creating Wonder: In Conversation with Amy Raphael. London: Faber and Faber. Bradshaw, Peter. (2011). ‘Jane Eyre  –  review.’ The Guardian (8 September). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/sep/08/jane‐eyre‐film‐review (accessed 18 October 2018). Cartmell, Deborah and Whelehan, Imelda (2010). Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Church Gibson, Pamela (2000). Fewer weddings and more funerals: changes in the heritage film. In: British Cinema of the 90s (ed. Robert Murphy), 114–124. London: BFI. Corrigan, Timothy (ed.) (2012). Film and Literature, 2e. London: Routledge. Davies, Andrew. (2011). ‘Andrew Davies on how to adapt literary classics for TV’. The Daily Telegraph (18 February). Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/ 8328055/Andrew‐Davies‐on‐how‐to‐adapt‐literary‐classics‐for‐TV.html (accessed 18 October 2018). Dyer, Richard (1993). Brief Encounter. London: BFI. Elliott, Kamilla (2012). Screened writers. In: A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation (ed. Deborah Cartmell), 179–197. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Galpin, Shelley Anne (2014). Auteurs and authenticity: adapting the Brontës in the twenty‐ first century. Journal of British Cinema and Television 11 (1): 86–100. Geraghty, Christine (2008). Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations from Literature and Drama. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Harper, Sue (1994). Picturing the Past. London: BFI. Harper, Sue (2009). Bonnie Prince Charlie revisited: British costume film in the 1950s. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 276–285. London: BFI. Higson, Andrew (2003). English Heritage, English Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higson, Andrew (2011). Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris.



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Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hodges, Mike (1999). Mike Hodges discusses Get Carter with the NFT audience, 23 September, 1997. In: British Crime Cinema (ed. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy), 117–122. London: Routledge. Hunter, Jefferson (2010). English Filming, English Writing. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jeffers, Jennifer M. (2006). Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Celia. (2008). ‘A profile of Brief Encounter’. DVD, ITV Studios Home Entertainment. Kozloff, Sarah (2000). Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Leggott, James (2008). Contemporary British Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. Leitch, Thomas (2003). Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory. Criticism 45 (2): 149–171. Macnab, Geoffrey (2011a). Jane Eyre. Sight & Sound 21 (10): 68–69. Macnab, Geoffrey. (2011b). ‘The Brontës  –  cinemagoers have had their fill of this sister  act’.  The Independent (8 April). Available at: www.independent.co.uk/ arts‐entertainment/films/features/the‐bronts‐‐cinemagoers‐have‐had‐their‐fill‐of‐ this‐sister‐act‐2264710.html (accessed 18 October 2018). McFarlane, Brian (1986). A literary cinema? British films and British novels. In: All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (ed. Charles Barr), 120–142. London: BFI. McFarlane, Brian (2009). The more things change … British cinema in the 90s. In: The British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 366–374. London: BFI. McFarlane, Brian and Williams, Deane (2009). Michael Winterbottom. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Motion, Andrew (1997). Keats: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber. Murphy, Robert (1999). A revenger’s tragedy – Get Carter. In: British Crime Cinema (ed. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy), 123–132. London: Routledge. Murray, Simone (2012). The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge. Narval Media/Birkbeck College/Media Consulting Group (2009). Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film 1946–2006. London: UKFC. Sadoff, Dianne F. (2010). Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shachar, Hila (2012). Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer, Norman. (2014). ‘How we made Hobson’s Choice’. The Guardian (30 June). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jun/30/how‐we‐made‐ hobsons‐choice‐prunella‐scales (accessed 18 October 2018). Stam, Robert (2004). Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation. In: Literature and Film: A Guide to Theory and Practice of Adaptation (ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo), 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell. Vidal, Belén (2012). Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation. London: Wallflower Press. Vincendeau, Ginette (ed.) (2001). Film/Literature/Heritage. London: BFI. Writers’ Workshop. (2014). ‘How to write a script’. Available at: www.writersworkshop. co.uk/how‐to‐write‐a‐script.html (accessed 15 September 2014).

9

British Film Genres Peter Hutchings

Introduction Is British cinema a genre cinema? Even the most cursory review of the critical material produced on British cinema during the past 20 years suggests that it is, at least to some extent. One easily finds numerous monographs devoted to the study of individual British film genres, as well as histories of British cinema that have used genres to characterise particular periods. In addition, collections of essays dealing with various themes and subjects in British film often include genre‐specific entries, with genre itself emerging from all this activity as a broadly accepted way of categorising, analysing, and evaluating British cinema. It is striking that in the majority of this work, genre refers to the kinds of categories one finds in popular entertainment cinema. Indeed, the study of genres has become one of the main ways in which British film historians have sought to redress what has come to be seen as an undue bias in previous critical work on the British film towards the ‘non‐generic’ and by implication the ‘unpopular’. As James Chapman notes: One of the legacies of traditional film criticism in Britain has been to ignore or denigrate the ‘popular’ at the expense of a ‘quality’ cinema identified with art and culture (which in Britain has usually meant documentary‐style realism or adaptations of classic literature). (Chapman 1998, p. 75)

Within such a context, the fact that ‘quality’ cinema might also be seen as p­ ossessing generic attributes has proved of less interest (although for a discussion of ‘quality’ cinema in terms of genre, see Ryall 1998).

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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For the noted French film director Jacques Rivette, British cinema is also a genre cinema. However, for him, that is not a positive thing. Back in 1957, as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, Rivette offered the following: British cinema is a genre cinema, but one where the genres have no genuine roots. On the one hand there are no self‐validating genres as there are in American cinema, like the Western and the thriller … There are just false, in the sense of imitative, genres. Anyway, most of them are only imitations of American imitations. (Bazin et al. 1985, p. 32)

This is one of the better‐known insults to have been directed at British cinema over the years, arguably second only to François Truffaut’s suggestion that there was ‘a certain incompatibility between the terms “cinema” and “Britain”’ (Truffaut 1968, p. 100). Given that this chapter deals with British film genres, it is tempting to get Rivette out of the way right at the beginning or, even better, ignore him entirely (see Ryall 1998 and Porter 1998, for robust dismissals of Rivette’s view). However, that turns out not to be as straightforward an exercise as one might expect, ­primarily because the context for Rivette’s comments is a little more complex and challenging than it first appears. Certainly, Rivette displays the all‐too‐familiar Cahiers du Cinéma disdain for British cinema but this particular lambasting of British genres occurred during a roundtable discussion in which six French critics were principally lamenting the state of French cinema, including French film genres. As André Bazin, another participant in this discussion, put it: ‘I am afraid that one of the problems of French cinema may arise from its inability to sustain good basic genres that thrive, the way they do in America’, to which Rivette responded: I think it’s impossible to do anything worthwhile in European cinema (not just French cinema, but English and Italian as well) except from that premise, i.e. the non‐existence of basic genres. One then has to resign oneself to exceptions. That means admitting from the outset that there can’t be any good European films, far less great ones, unless one decides not to make use of ‘genre’ subjects, since every genre is essentially doomed to failure. (Bazin et al. 1985, p. 33)

Clearly the idea of the ‘non‐existence of basic genres’ in a European context is an evaluative one: as Rivette himself acknowledges, genres very visibly do exist in European cinema, including in British cinema. As an idea, it also flies in the face of the critical work done on British film genres that has found both positive value and a national‐cultural distinctiveness in them. However, Rivette’s comments do alert us to issues that have perhaps not been as fully and systematically addressed as they might have in some of this work. Not least of these is the fact that genres tend to have international dimensions, with the conventions and practices associated with them readily crossing national borders. The implications this might have for placing genre films within particular national film cultures is not always clear. From such a perspective, are British film genres in effect passing through British film

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culture, in so doing establishing creative and commercial relations with other national cinemas, not least Hollywood cinema, which for many is the genre cinema par excellence? Accordingly, is the best way of engaging with them not as nationally distinctive films but rather as films that form part of an international pattern of generic development? Or are British film genres more embedded or rooted in something specifically national, however one defines this, and consequently cut off to some degree from versions of the genres found elsewhere in the world? Questions such as these come out of what might be viewed as an awkward or ungainly quality built into the very notion of British film genres and an associated sense that the presence of genres within British cinema poses problems, particularly to do with how national cultures are defined and understood, that are ­navigated with varying degrees of explicitness in the critical responses to the genres in question. In part, this chapter will be exploring some of the strategies adopted by critics and historians in placing and making sense of British film genres both generally and as particular sets of films that operate within specific historical contexts. As we will see, these strategies often entail the deployment of methods and critical approaches associated more generally with the study of genre in other national and international contexts. It follows that it can sometimes be difficult to pin down what is distinctively British about a genre, either in itself or in the way that it is being analysed even in those critical accounts firmly wedded to the idea that genre is important to an understanding of British cinema. It is worth noting in this regard that the initial appeal of genre when it first appeared as a critical concept during the 1970s was that it was meant to put criticism in touch with what audiences were viewing and what personnel in the film industry were doing. In a classic statement of this foundational generic relationship, Tom Ryall wrote: ‘The master image for genre criticism is the triangle ­composed of artist/film/ audience. Genres may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film maker, and their reading by an audience’ (Ryall 1975, p. 28). However, genre criticism has since generally moved beyond the idea of genres as comprising closed systems of shared knowledge in favour of a model more open to the idea that over time genres will accumulate a varied range of definitions, interpretations, and evaluations that have been produced by different groups of genre users, including critics and historians. This shift towards a more discursive approach, with an associated looseness when it comes to genre definition, has been reflected in the range of British genre criticism explored by this chapter. It is most evident in a willingness to replace or ignore industrial generic designations in favour of critically or theoretically‐generated generic categories that sometimes seem to have little significance or meaning for either audiences or the industry. The extent to which this practice contradicts or attenuates the historical‐contextualising approaches that have been central to the development of the study of British cinema in the past two decades clearly merits some attention. Certainly, notions of the industrial and the popular ­sometimes seem to recede in British genre criticism, even though these notions



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are, as we have seen, often presented as the main reason for why looking at genres in general and British film genres in particular is of value. In this, as in so many other ways, genre emerges as a potentially awkward presence within British film culture or, more particularly, in some of the ways that this culture has been defined, discussed and written about.

The Britishness of British Film Genres At first glance, two of the most ambitious attempts to divide British cinema into generic categories or types could not be more different from each other. Denis Gifford’s The British Film Catalogue 1895–1970 (1973) places 14161 ‘entertainment’ films into 23 categories in a manner that from the perspective of genre studies today seems more than a little perfunctory and arbitrary. By contrast, Marcia Landy’s 1991 monograph British Genres: Cinema and Society: 1930–1960 is an authoritative critical account that combines historical analysis with a theorisation of genre’s ideological function and in its identification of British genres largely reflects a critical consensus as to what the key genres actually are. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Gifford’s and Landy’s approaches to British film genres do have something in common. Gifford does not use the term ‘genre’ when explaining his 23 categories but some of them map onto accepted genres, for example, crime, horror, the musical and war, with science fiction folded into a larger category of fantasy. Interestingly, there is a grouping of categories specific to early and silent film, reflecting what appears to be a different generic regime (although whether the categories offered by Gifford – which include ‘chase’, ‘facial’, and ‘pathos’ – are appropriate is moot). But there are also categories from the sound period that look more like short‐lived cycles of production, notably ‘Nudist’, which Gifford defines, with what one suspects is a deadpan humour, as an inflection of other genres: ‘Comedy, drama or romance in which one or more performers appear naked. Usually set in a nudist camp’ (Gifford 1973, p. 12). Indeed Gifford’s definition of the musical similarly ­renders it as an inflection of other genres: ‘Comedy, drama or romance with an above‐average quota of songs or dances’ (Gifford 1973, p. 12). In addition, Gifford offers categories that might have the potential to be British genres but generally have not been treated in that way. For example, ‘animals’ – ‘Dramatic, humorous, or adventure story in which the key figure is an animal’ – or, more credibly, ‘sport’ (Gifford 1973, p. 12). (See Jordan 2005, for an interesting critical attempt to establish the characteristics of a British sports film genre.) The inclusion of a ‘Western’ category might seem surprising in the context of a book dealing with British cinema, although this turns out to relate more to early cinema than it does to the sound period. However, Gifford’s straightforward definition of what makes a film British, at least in the post‐1927 period  –  its registration with the Board of

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Trade – captures films that have not often been thought of as culturally British: in the case of the western, the British production Shalako (1968) and the rather more outré The Singer Not the Song (1961). Finally, and perhaps inevitably given the requirement to categorise all British entertainment films, The British Film Catalogue uses the catch‐all category ‘Drama’, defined as ‘General term for any serious story which cannot be classified under a more particular heading’, in effect the genre for films that are not obviously generic’ (Gifford 1973, p. 12). Given the extraordinary scope of The British Film Catalogue, it is understandable that Gifford’s categorisations sometimes seem impressionistic or eccentric. Indeed, some of these categorisations contradict not just common critical‐generic designations but also industrial ones. Take the series of psychological thrillers produced by Hammer from Taste of Fear (US: Scream of Fear, 1961) onwards. These have tended to be folded into the horror genre, reflecting not just the way in which psychological thrillers after Psycho (1960) were often marketed as ‘horror’ but also the marketing of these particular films by Hammer, where on their initial release they were ­frequently coupled on double bills with the company’s Gothic horror productions. It is therefore unsurprising that in subsequent critical writing, Hammer’s psychological ­thrillers – which also include Paranoiac (1963), Hysteria (1965), and Fanatic (US title: Die, Die, My Darling, 1965) – have been positioned in relation to horror. For instance, in the Routledge‐published ‘British Popular Cinema’ series of books, they are ­discussed in the volume devoted to British horror (Chibnall and Petley 2002) rather than in the volume on British crime (Chibnall and Murphy 1999). However, Gifford labels them all as ‘crime’ and does the same for the Anglo‐Amalgamated films Circus of Horrors (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960) and the Jack the Ripper film A Study in Terror (1965), although these too were marketed and ­discussed as horror, both on their release and since. (Inconsistently, Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), a third Anglo‐Amalgamated production often linked with Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom, not least by David Pirie in his ground‐breaking book A Heritage of Horror (1973), is placed in the ‘Horror’ category (Figure 9.1)). In contrast to this, Marcia Landy’s British Genres: Cinema and Society sets out what seems to be a more ordered and academic approach to its subject. However, much like The British Film Catalogue, Landy’s book brings together genres that have some basis in industrial or popular categorisations – for example, comedy, h ­ istorical dramas, horror, science fiction, war films – with genres that exist more at the critically‐constructed end of the spectrum. Notable as a potential example of the ­latter is melodrama, which, according to Landy, is ‘a major genre in the British cinema’ (Landy 1991, p. 189), although the extent to which either it or the sub‐categories that Landy finds within it, which include the woman’s film, the family melodrama, and the tragic melodrama, functioned as actual marketing categories in the period covered by Landy’s book remains unexplored. Elsewhere Sue Harper has argued that the woman’s film was such a marketing category in British cinema from the 1930s through to the late 1950s (Harper 2010, p. 125), but it does seem that ‘family melodrama’ and ‘tragic melodrama’ were not labels under which films were sold.



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Figure 9.1  Crossing genre boundaries: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).

Instead these terms serve to facilitate investigations of what are essentially thematic groupings and distinctions. In part, the emphasis here on melodrama can be seen as coming out of the extensive research undertaken on film ­melodrama in the decade before the publication of British Genres: Cinema and Society (see, for example, Murphy and Aspinall 1983 and Gledhill 1987). It reflects many of the critical and theoretical concerns of that earlier work, and, in places at least, seems detached from historical categorisations of the films concerned, whatever they might have been. The final chapter in British Genres: Cinema and Society is devoted to the social problem film, another critical genre (and one which, like the variants on ­melodrama offered by Landy, finds no place in Gifford’s categories). John Hill’s influential earlier work on social problem films had discussed them in narrative and thematic rather than generic terms, noting ‘variations in style and tone between films’ while finding a shared concern ‘to raise topical social issues within a commercial ­cinematic form’ (Hill 1986, p. 67; see also Hill 2003) (Figure 9.2). It is clear from Hill’s analysis of particular social problem films that this commercial form is often a generic one, with genres such as crime thus providing a context or setting for particular thematic or ideological preoccupations. Indeed, in a short essay for the Encyclopaedia of British Film, he refers to the social problem film as a ‘generic hybrid’ in which ‘elements of social realism’ are combined with ‘plot and character elements drawn from popular genres such as the crime film … and the family melodrama’ (Hill 2003, p. 625). Landy, too, finds that these films ‘were eclectic in nature, fusing melodrama, docudrama, and social realism’ (Landy 1991, p. 432). However, in bringing together a broader range of films than Hill

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Figure 9.2  The ‘social problem film’: Violent Playground (1958).

(whose study restricted itself to the late 1950s and the early 1960s), she makes a strong claim for the social problem film being a distinct British generic category, again in a way that proves productive in terms of analysis but at the same time also ­marginalises ­possible other generic identities associated with the films. Both The British Film Catalogue and British Genre: Cinema and Society thus offer an approach to generic categorisation that involves interventions into the grouping of particular films as much as it records how films have been grouped by others, including the industry. At the same time, there is also a sense running through these books, albeit a largely implicit one, of how tentative some of these categories are, and how films can in fact exist in relation to multiple categories at once. Hence some of Gifford’s categories inflecting and being wound around others; hence too Landy’s idea (following Hill) of the significance of crime‐related ­conventions to certain social problem films. Much subsequent work on British film genres has displayed a similar willingness to negotiate new generic identities or, more pragmatically, to narrow down its focus onto particular sections of a more broadly defined generic grouping, with this definitional activity cutting across a more traditional sense that genres come  to criticism pre‐defined as industrial categories (and, as we have already seen for horror, those industrial ­categories can themselves be complex). So, in its



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Introduction, British Crime Cinema establishes a specialist focus that arguably reflects a critical definition of a genre: Our concern in this book is not with the crime genre in its entirety, but with that part of it that we might term ‘underworld films.’ Although outnumbered by the murder mysteries and espionage thrillers that are such a familiar part of British popular fiction, films in which the activities of professional criminals feature significantly or which are set in an underworld milieu constitute a substantial crime sub‐genre and one with strong claims to social relevance. (Chibnall and Murphy 1999, pp. 2–3)

In the companion volume British Women’s Cinema, the editors map their particular version of ‘the woman’s picture’ onto pre‐existing generic categories: ‘such films are not solely woman’s films but they are also woman’s films, and to fail to recognise that means ignoring a large part of their substance and their appeal’ (Bell and Williams 2010, p. 6). Later they add, ‘there needs to be an acknowledgement of the “woman’s‐picture‐ness” of many key British films which are usually syphoned off into other generic categories’ (Bell and Williams 2010, pp. 7–8). Critical work on British queer cinema, British cult cinema, and British trash cinema has also conjured customised categories that are placed over pre‐existing generic categories, however, these might be defined, as a way of recovering marginalised representational histories in the case of queer cinema (Griffiths 2006) or in recognition of new fan‐generated ways of grouping and valuing films in the case of cult and trash cinema (Smith 2010; Hunter 2013). Underpinning this is a particular identification of the Britishness of British film genres, one that is founded on the commercial popularity of the films and genres being discussed. The fact of that popularity is established by assuming, quite reasonably, that genres or specific groups of commercially‐produced films only exist if there is a market for them. These are the films that British audiences actually turn out to see, as opposed to some of the more critically valorised or prestigious British films which, in some cases at least, have attracted smaller audiences than more obviously generic fare. A further common assumption is that this popularity in itself grounds the films and their genres in a historical and social reality, which means that British genres are seen as speaking to or of specifically British concerns. It is perhaps not surprising in this regard that analysis of British genre films often engages with them in ideological terms in a manner comparable with the critical treatment of genres in other national contexts. Such analysis aims to tease out the ways in which British genres offer imaginary resolutions to or troubled explorations of historically specific anxieties or problems within the lived experience of British audiences. In this respect, it is worth returning to Marcia Landy’s British Genres: Cinema and Society 1930–1960: I assume the films to be speaking in a language of conflicting attitudes and values that provide insights into British culture and ideologies. The films produce ­identifiable images from the psychic and social landscape, and, in varying degrees, a

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recognition of obstacles to the gratification of needs. The images may not bear an immediate resemblance to everyday reality, but the films reveal that the cinema of genres is not ideology talking to itself. No one would claim that the films produced an oppositional discourse that profoundly altered British life, but they reveal the ­contradictory aspects of consensus, and, moreover, that the cinema was increasingly capable of representing conflicts that would later become the basis for a different ordering of experience. (Landy 1991, p. 6)

She adds: ‘Genre is not an essential and impersonal structure outside of history. The conventions and codes associated with particular genres are part of a familiar landscape and an immediate, if not everyday, context’ (Landy 1991, p. 9). British film genres are thus rendered as British not just because they sometimes draw upon nationally‐specific resources, whether these are to do with British history or British culture (for example, historical dramas or Gothic horror films), but also because they exhibit a nationally‐specific social engagement. This is why they have proved so useful to historians of British cinema; they are a type of popular cinema that can be used to capture ideological and thematic preoccupations in a manner that is grounded in a sense both of the lived experience of audiences and the historical specificity of particular periods. For example, Sarah Street’s historical overview, British National Cinema (1997), is largely organised through a sense of which genres were popular in each decade: British cinema’s eclectic base engendered a number of key genres which displayed ­considerable internal differences and emphases over the decades. While e­ clecticism was mostly founded on economic insecurity, it did, however, produce a variety of product which makes generic analysis a particularly useful way to assess the ­various r­epresentations of Britishness which competed for audiences’ attention. (Street 1997, p. 61)

So, for example, for the 1930s, ‘Dominant genres were historical/costume; empire; comedy; musicals (musical comedies); melodramas. While many of these are part of longer generic trajectories, their deployment nevertheless reveals national and social concerns which are particular to the 1930s’ (Street 1997, p. 39), while the 1945–late 1950s period ‘saw the decline of historical/costume films; the development of British comedy; a 1940s cycle of “spiv” films/British films noirs; the rise of Cold War films; science‐fiction; horror; and the social‐problem film’ (Street 1997, p. 63). For Robert Murphy’s study of 1960s British cinema, the genres that reveal what is going on socially and historically include crime, social problem films, horror and science fiction, pop musicals and comedy (Murphy 1992). The themes and contexts of 1970s British cinema are accessible via horror and crime, both of which are of a more obviously exploitative kind than before, as well as musicals, comedy, and dystopian science fiction (see, for example, Newland 2010 and Shail 2008). For the 1980s and 1990s, the genres of interest include the heritage costume drama and the romantic comedy. Bringing us up to date, in the 2000s, we



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find a revival of horror, along with gangster movies, comedies (including romantic comedies), history and costume film, all of which speak to the social and cultural changes that characterise contemporary Britain (see Leggott 2008, pp. 53–82, for a discussion of contemporary genres in British cinema). This approach to British film history has certainly been productive but its association of commercial popularity with social relevance or engagement can be seen as problematic. By no means all films in a particular generic category are commercially successful, and the reasons for whatever success occurs at the box‐ office might have nothing to do with the kind of thematic/social/ideological ­significance detected by analyses of those films or genres to which they have been assigned. It might instead relate to other qualities in these films or be extrinsic to the films, to do with marketing strategies or whatever is competing for an ­audience’s attention at the time of any film’s release. This situation is compounded when the genres in question are critically defined rather than coming out of industrial categorisations. The fact that most genre films seen by British audiences throughout much of the history of British cinema have been American also merits some consideration. The extent to which any nationally‐specific account of any British film genre can be socially grounded in a sense that this is the kind of thing that British audiences want to see surely has to incorporate all the other films that British audiences want to see, including the non‐British ones. (For a discussion of notions of the popular as a problem in the study of British film genres, see Street 1998). An overview of critical writing on British film genres suggests that, in certain respects at least, there still remains something Giffordesque about the whole enterprise. While much of this writing is strongly historical, the generic categories deployed therein are not just quite general but also presented as permeable and rewritable, and films can accordingly be moved around to suit particular analytical aims. In a sense, genre has here become predominantly a critical tool, a way of grouping films for the purposes of historical and ideological analysis. The idea that generic categories themselves are changeable constructions so far as their industrial usage is concerned, and that films can have more than one generic identity even before the historians get to them, remains marginal. In an i­nteresting account of debates about the British heritage film, Claire Monk captures some of these classificatory difficulties in trying to pin down generic categorisations both critically and industrially: Thus a costume film, literary adaptation or narrative derived from ‘real’ history may also be a melodrama, romance, comedy, satire, picaresque, fantasy, crime film, action adventure, political thriller, colonial epic, war film, horror or vampire film – or a mixture of more than one of these. (Monk 2002, p. 176)

It follows that even those histories of British genres that rely on categories that do exist industrially  –  for example, horror or crime  –  often do not capture the

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c­ omplex and not always coherent ways in which the industry deploys a range of generic categories in relation to different sets of films. Thinking about genre in this way can lead to a less nation‐centred way of understanding British film genres.

The Genericity of British Film Genres The presence of international genres in British cinema certainly has the potential to diminish its quotient of ‘Britishness’, however one defines this. Put crudely, this sometimes becomes manifest in critical writing on British cinema in the form of what might be termed the wrong kind of genre or popular cinema, one that leads away from specifically British concerns or threatens to overwhelm them, as opposed to the socially‐grounded model of British genres outlined in the previous section of this chapter. It is worth beginning in this respect with a type or sub‐ genre of film that to some degree offers itself as quintessentially British in terms of subject‐matter and setting but which has been met with considerable critical suspicion, namely, the heritage film that first appeared in the 1980s and 1990s with the likes of A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992). Claire Monk has ­convincingly argued that ‘heritage film’ is a critical genre or category that was developed after the appearance of these films as a predominantly negative response to them: The idea, and critique, of heritage cinema first emerged in Britain in the late 1980s to early 1990s as a deferred response from the academic/intellectual left to certain British period films produced or released since the early 1980s … The initial coinage and use of the term ‘heritage film’  –  and contemporary synonyms for the same group of films, such as ‘white‐flannel films’ – were openly pejorative and dismissive. (Monk 2002, p. 177)

Such films might well have featured ‘the best of British’ in terms of their literary sources, their country‐house settings, and their quality British casts, but they were generally deemed to be packaging this material primarily for export and in doing this offered little or no engagement with the realities of British society. From this perspective, they comprised an overly internationalised generic format (although this has not stopped some critics from writing about them as British films). Whatever one makes of the debates that have been staged around the heritage film, the idea one often finds there of a detachment from British social reality, ­coupled with a sense of international markets, flows through critical writing on British genres as something that needs to be recognised, guarded against and, where appropriate, repudiated. For instance, it is common in accounts of those



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British film genres which also obviously exist as genres outside of Britain to ­distance the British version from other versions. This is often achieved through a display of modesty, drawing attention to the relatively limited budgets and technical resources available in the British film industry (especially in comparison with American cinema), with this h ­ aving consequences for the kinds of genre films produced in Britain. Additionally, the idea of there being an innately British sensibility evident in genre films that distinguishes them from non‐British entries into the same genre also features. Take, as an example of both these tendencies, John Mundy’s account of British film musicals, which works hard to find something nationally distinctive in his subject in the face of the massive dominance of this genre by Hollywood. Mundy refers to the smaller budgets and modest technologies available to British filmmakers as important contextual markers of differences but also comes up with this: If, for example, a sense of optimism, energy and abundance are said to characterise the classical Hollywood musical, we need to start from an acknowledgement that British musicals are perhaps simply less optimistic, less energetic, less abundant and fulsome. In the British musical, utopia is often, at best, tentative, constrained by an awareness of the realities of class and region. (Mundy 2007, p. 6)

I.Q. Hunter’s account of British trash cinema pursues what might be seen as a similarly miserabilist line in eschewing many of the transgressive delights associated with this particular critical genre in favour of something more limited and dour: British trash cinema is arguably distinct from the disreputable cult cinema of the US and continental Europe … Although this book trolls through a cinema of ­transgression, not all of it is a wild ride into excess, subversion and lurid erotic defiance. British trash is also, and perhaps mostly, a cinema of routine underachievement, of stupid sub‐B movies, austerity thrillers, unfunny comedies and failed grabs at naughtiness. Sometimes inspired, frequently weird, often sad and desperate – rather, in fact, like Britain itself – our trash cinema opens out not only a world of exotic pleasures but also one of compromise and impoverishment, thwarted ambition, social embarrassment, silent erotic yearning and suburban boredom. (Hunter 2013, pp. 3–4)

Or, in the case of British science fiction cinema: ‘British sf films have often failed, or lacked ambition, or suffered from inadequate budgets … and never have they wholly emerged from the shadow of the American films which by turn they have imitated, subverted and worked variations on’ (Hunter 1999, p. 14). A concern with budgeting might seem prosaic in this context, but it is i­ mportant. The bigger a film’s budget, the less likely it is that the film in question is being

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f­ ashioned solely for local‐national markets, the more likely it will involve international qualities in terms both its funding and its forms. Returning to the musical, Andrew Higson has compared two 1934 British musicals in this respect, Evergreen and Sing As We Go. The bigger‐budgeted Evergreen is a polished studio film, which quite successfully emulates contemporary Hollywood musicals in terms of subject‐matter and theme, energy, staging, and art direction … it aspires to a certain universality – which was of course precisely the intention of the  producers, with their eyes firmly on the American market. (Higson 1995, pp. 102–103)

By contrast, what Higson terms the ‘anticlassicism’ of the considerably cheaper Sing As We Go limits its international appeal, in part by placing it within ‘a specific regional locality, reinforced by the pervasiveness of regional and class‐ specific accents’ (Higson 1995, p. 103). This idea that a film’s orientation to international markets is discernible, at least in part, through its budget, and that this has implications for the ways that Britishness or Englishness gets represented, has recently been developed by Higson in the context of contemporary cinema. Using the Harry Potter, Tomb Raider, and James Bond films as his examples, Higson argues that The bigger the budget, in broad terms, the more conventional and conservative the ideologies of Englishness on display; smaller budgets by contrast tended to lend themselves much more readily to innovative representations of a more extensive range of social types. (Higson 2011, p. 29)

Seen generally, this critical work tends to present a defence of one kind of British genre film‐making – often lower‐budgeted than its international counterparts and committed to capturing in some form or other or connecting with a native social realty – against an internationalised genre cinema that, inasmuch as it gets into the British film industry or makes use of British cultural resources, exploits Britishness for its own profiteering ends. But does it have to be like this? What other ways are there of thinking about British film genres in terms of their relation to internationalised versions of those genres? Certainly some accounts of British film genres seem more comfortable with the idea of there being non‐British entrants into the genres in question. For example, James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull’s study of films about the British Empire incorporate without fuss or undue defensiveness both British‐produced and American‐produced contributions to what might well have been perceived as an innately British genre (Chapman and Cull 2009). Looking at the British horror film also proves interesting in these terms. Horror is without doubt a major British film genre and, so far as critical writing is concerned, it was one of the first genres to be presented in that way.



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In A Heritage of Horror, David Pirie’s now‐classic 1973 study of the genre, one finds the f­ ollowing statement: It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial, historical and artistic grounds that the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America. (Pirie 1973, p. 9)

Indeed, it is quite easy to find Britishness in British horror cinema, both in its original manifestations during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and in the very different forms it assumes on its return to British cinema during the 2000s. Most British horror films are low‐budget, and they are generally free of any obvious up‐front attempts to pander to non‐British markets (i.e. there are only a few examples of imported American stars to bolster their international box‐office appeal). For the Gothic horrors produced by Hammer, there is the possibility of a connection with a long‐standing British cultural tradition of Gothic fiction. More generally, British horror films, Gothic or otherwise, can readily be placed in relation to British social trends and changes contemporaneous with their production. (For accounts of British horror in these terms, see Hunt 1998, Hutchings 1994, and Chibnall 1998). This applies equally to the new wave of British horror cinema that appeared from the late 1990s onwards, even though these films have in the main eschewed the formats and themes of the older British horror. Contemporary anxieties around social deprivation, the development of an ‘underclass’, and fears of gang culture are manifest in the likes of The Disappeared (2008), Eden Lake (2008) and Outcast (2010), and the ‘hoodie horrors’ F (2010), and Heartless (2009). Additionally, explorations of the British rural can be found in The Borderlands (2013), The Children (2008), Dog Soldiers (2002), and Doghouse (2009), to name but a few. Underpinning all of these are representations of particular kinds of class difference and social nuance that align these films strongly with their British context. (For a discussion of some of the new British horrors within a specifically Scottish context, see David Martin‐Jones 2009, pp. 113–134.) Yet, at the same time, it is also possible to find international elements firmly embedded in the development of the British horror film from its inception onwards. This is manifested in funding, with Hammer in particular benefitting from US funding, often achieved via distribution deals with American companies. (See Barnett 2014, for a discussion of some of the intricacies of Hammer’s funding in this regard.) In addition, the US exploitation specialists at American International Pictures (AIP) entered into co‐production deals with both Hammer and its main rival Amicus during the 1960s and 1970s (which often involved the presence of American horror star Vincent Price who throughout much of this period was ­contracted to AIP). So far as story content was concerned, Amicus specialised in adapting American source material, including the work of Robert Bloch and stories

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from EC horror comics, while Hammer, in one of the great ‘might‐have‐been’ projects of 1950s British horror, attempted an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s ­classic American vampire story I Am Legend, scripted by Matheson himself, only to be thwarted at pre‐production stage by the disapproval of US and British censors. (For  a discussion of Amicus, see Hutchings 2002; for details of the I Am Legend adaptation, see Hutchings 2008.) As American funds faded away during the 1970s, Hammer in particular entered into other international projects, notably the British‐Hong Kong production Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) and the British‐German co‐production To the Devil a Daughter (1976). Some Spanish filmmakers also made excursions to Britain during this period, among them Jose Larraz (responsible for Vampyres, 1974) and Jorge Grau (responsible for The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, 1974), while Adam Locks has identified the influence of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento in the low‐budget and apparently very parochial 1970s British horror films directed by Norman J. Warren (Locks 2010). Even the grim 1970s horror films from Pete Walker, which have tended to be ­presented in British film criticism as fiercely inward in their social and cultural preoccupations, merit a mention, alongside the British production Death Line (US: Raw Meat, 1972), identified in Robin Wood’s seminal essay ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, as exemplifying American‐style trends in the genre (Wood 1985). The new British horror film also has impeccable international credentials, not only through the international funding that has often underpinned it but also through its reliance on internationally developed horror formats, such as the zombie film, rural horror, or the found footage horror film. These are usually reworked within a specifically British context as a way of rendering them ­distinctive  –  so, for example, both Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Doghouse wrap zombie‐horror conventions recognisable from American and Italian horror cinema around specifically English social references, while The Borderlands uses the conventions of found‐footage, again developed elsewhere, in what in other ­ regards seems a very English‐centred story about hidden rural histories. Yet the ­recognisability of those conventions outside of Britain clearly enhances the marketability of British horror films, not just in terms of securing an international release but in connecting with fan‐centred domestic markets that are largely founded on a knowledge and appreciation of international horror. It seems from this that the British horror genre can be approached both in terms of its place within a national context and in terms of its contribution to the international development of the horror genre. So far as its contemporary version in particular is concerned, this aligns it with developments in other countries which pick up generic conventions and formats from elsewhere and rework them in terms of national idioms (Hutchings 2014). This in turn suggests that there is indeterminacy here with respect to horror’s alignment with a national film culture that is manifested not just in the films but also in their production and reception contexts, with this being articulated in a different fashion in different periods.



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It follows that British horror can be seen as a British film genre in ways that are rather obvious but at the same time it can also be seen as something embedded in international generic formations, and because of this it can be written up critically in quite different ways, depending on one’s perspective. Although many of the qualities outlined here are specific to the horror genre, the idea of indeterminacy is potentially applicable to other genres as a way of moving beyond what has sometimes seemed an undue critical preoccupation with separating British film genres out from a broader understanding of how genres operate. It is legitimate to consider whether nation‐centred interpretations of genres have sometimes shaped those genres to fit a particular understanding of what a national film culture should, or should not, be. Restoring a sense that British genre films, like genre films generally, often carry with them a great deal of ambiguity about what their national/generic allegiances and identities actually are, arguably points to a less defensive approach to British film genres, one in which the international qualities of a genre are not necessarily or invariably a threat to anything perceived as distinctively British. This might seem a rather obvious point when made in a contemporary context in which national film industries are becoming increasingly globalised, but the case of British horror suggests that it has historical relevance as well.

Conclusion This chapter could have been written in another way. It could have comprised a discussion of the major British film genres, putting them in their nationally specific social, historical, and cultural contexts. However, that kind of approach seemed inadequate to the subject. The sense of genres existing elsewhere and in various ways pressing in on the British versions was too overwhelming to be marginalised or ignored. It is certainly clear from looking at the extensive critical work done on British film genres that the idea of genre offers a particular set of challenges to the defining and promoting of a national film culture. Indeed, one might argue that a lot of this critical work is driven, in part at least, by the perceived need to take on some of these challenges. At the same time, and for all the detailed and nuanced analyses that have come out of the study of British film genres, the genres themselves have sometimes appeared elusive. The ways in which British genres have often been defined either critically or through a priori assumptions about which films belong to a particular genre clearly stand at the heart of this. As already noted, genre has proved an extremely useful tool for grouping films in a manner that has facilitated incisive analyses of particular ideological/thematic preoccupations in British cinema and their connection with a broader social reality. Yet the relation of these generic identifications to what might be viewed as ‘on‐the‐ground’ deployments of generic categories, formats or types

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has rarely been a focus for investigation. Because of this, critical work on British film genres can sometimes seem lopsided. It is very sophisticated in its dealing with what are often complex concepts of what the national might mean in particular contexts, but considerably less so in its conceptual take on what genres are. Detailed historical investigations of how genres or categories are constructed and circulated, by the film industry, by journalism, and by audiences, either in interaction or in isolation from each other, are not that common in British film studies. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that the picture of genres that emerges from such an approach is one of fragmentation, pragmatism, contingency, and inconsistency. Indeed, it is arguably through this kind of activity that the relations between British versions of genres and non‐British versions of genres are being constantly worked through in ways that will often be messy and which stand at some distance from the more abstract models of genre deployed in critical writing. What this suggests is that, for all the extraordinary opening up of popular British genre cinema to critical scrutiny that has taken place over the past two decades, there is yet more to be discovered and yet more to be discussed.

References Barnett, Vincent L. (2014). Hammering out a deal: the contractual and commercial contexts of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34 (2): 231–252. Bazin, André, et al. (1985). Six characters in search of auteurs: a discussion about the French cinema (May 1957). In: Cahiers du Cinéma  –  the 1950s: Neo‐Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (ed. Jim Hillier), 31–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bell, Melanie and Williams, Melanie (eds.) (2010). British Women’s Cinema. London:  Routledge. Chapman, James (1998). Celluloid shockers. In: The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 (ed. Jeffrey Richards), 75–97. London: I.B. Tauris. Chapman, James and Cull, Nicholas J. (2009). Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Chibnall, Steve (1998). Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker. Guildford, Surrey: Fab Press. Chibnall, Steve and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1999). British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge. Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (eds.) (2002). British Horror Cinema. London: Routledge. Gifford, Denis (1973). The British Film Catalogue 1895–1970. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Gledhill, Christine (ed.) (1987). Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute. Griffiths, Robin (ed.) (2006). British Queer Cinema. London: Routledge. Harper, Sue (2010). The British women’s picture: methodology, agency and performance in the 1970s. In: British Women’s Cinema (ed. Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams), 124–137. London: Routledge.



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Higson, Andrew (1995). Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, Andrew (2011). Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, John (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: British Film Institute. Hill, John (2003). Social problem films. In: The Encyclopedia of British Film (ed. Brian McFarlane), 625. London: BFI/Methuen. Hunt, Leon (1998). British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation. London: Routledge. Hunter, I.Q. (ed.) (1999). British Science Fiction Cinema. London: Routledge. Hunter, I.Q. (2013). British Trash Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Hutchings, Peter (1994). Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutchings, Peter (2002). The Amicus house of horror. In: British Horror Cinema (ed. Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley), 131–145. London: Routledge. Hutchings, Peter (2008). American vampires in Britain: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Hammer’s Night Creatures. In: Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (ed. Dan North), 53–70. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Hutchings, Peter (2014). Northern darkness: the curious case of the Swedish vampire. In: Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (ed. Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson), 54–70. London: I.B. Tauris. Jordan, Glen (2005). Down on the floor and give me ten sit‐ups: British sports feature films. Film and History 35 (2): 29–40. Landy, Marcia (1991). British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leggott, James (2008). Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror. London: Wallflower Press. Locks, Adam (2010). Anglo Argento: a critical reassessment of the films of Norman J. Warren. In: British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade (ed. Laurel Foster and Sue Harper), 213–224. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Martin‐Jones, David (2009). Scotland: Global Cinema  –  Genres, Modes and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Monk, Claire (2002). The British heritage‐film debate revisited. In: British Historical Cinema (ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant), 176–198. London: Routledge. Mundy, John (2007). The British Musical Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murphy, Robert (1992). Sixties British Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Murphy, Robert and Aspinall, Sue (eds.) (1983). Gainsborough Melodrama. London: British Film Institute. Newland, Paul (ed.) (2010). Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s. London: Intellect. Pirie, David (1973). A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972. London:  Gordon Fraser. Porter, Vincent (1998). Between structure and history: genre in popular British cinema. Journal of Popular British Cinema 1: 25–36. Ryall, Tom (1975). Teaching through genre. Screen Education 17: 27–33. Ryall, Tom (1998). British cinema and genre. Journal of Popular British Cinema 1: 18–24. Shail, Robert (ed.) (2008). Seventies British Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Smith, Justin (2010). Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Street, Sarah (1997). British National Cinema. London: Routledge. Street, Sarah (1998). Popular British cinema? Journal of Popular British Cinema 1: 13–17. Truffaut, François (1968). Hitchcock. London: Secker & Warburg. Wood, Robin (1985). An introduction to the American horror film. In: Movies and Methods:  Volume 2 (ed. Barry Nichols), 195–220. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

10

British Cinema and Authorship Sheldon Hall

Introduction No‐one could deny that British scholars have made a very substantial contribution to the development of theories of film authorship and the practice of auteurist film criticism. From pioneering accounts of the director’s creative role in influential film journals such as Sequence and Movie, to the many director monographs that appeared in the explosion of film‐book publishing in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the deconstruction and revision of notions of authorship by theorists and ­historians in the 1970s and after, British film criticism and British film scholarship have been centrally involved in first promoting and then reconceptualising the figure of the director as author.1 What is remarkable, however, is how little of this writing until recently has been focused on British cinema and British filmmakers. It is difficult to think of any key theoretical text by any of the leading British writers published in the heyday of auteurism that took the British films of a British director as its main illustrative examples. If it be objected that the case of Alfred Hitchcock alone refutes this argument, it should be borne in mind that Hitchcockians such as Robin Wood and Ian Cameron focused almost exclusively on his American work, scorning the early British period as artistic juvenilia, and that Hitchcock himself gave up his British identity when in 1955 he became an American citizen. From 1940 onwards, Hitchcock was Hollywood.2 Although the growth of European art cinema paralleled the flourishing of auteur theory during the 1950s and 1960s, providing many instances of filmmakers who could so dominate perception of their work as to forge not only distinct artistic personalities but also marketable public personae, the main arena for film authorship debates was Hollywood. This was due not only to the plethora of A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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directors in the Golden Age and long twilight of the studio system who could be identified and celebrated as unsung artists, but also the fact that this very system, in its compartmentalised, industrialised efficiency, provided the forum in which the discovery of individual artistry carried the greatest force. As Wood wrote in one of his more wide‐ranging accounts of auteurism: Its usefulness and interest exist within clearly defined limits, namely the studio‐dominated ‘commercial’ cinema where the director is an employee. The proposition that (granted the social and historical determinants operative on any work of art) Bergman and Fellini are the real authors of most of their films is uninteresting because self‐evident. The ‘auteur theory’ is of value only where its validity is highly arguable. (2006, p. 213)

Why, then, was it not applied more regularly to filmmakers in the British studio system, where the barriers to free personal expression could be just as formidable as in Hollywood, if not more so? For Alan Lovell, the answer was clear: ‘There don’t seem to be any directors for whom a prima facie case could be made for their interest and representative quality’ (1969, p. 5). This neglect continues to a degree even in modern scholarship. Although ­monographs and anthologies on British filmmakers and British films have appeared in abundance over the last two decades, their focus has not always been primarily on the director’s authorial status or on reading the films through a traditional auteurist framework, but instead on placing such figures and their work in a broader cultural, social, historical, and industrial context. For writers concerned with questions of authorship in general but not with British cinema in particular, British films and filmmakers still rarely serve as examples. Of the 60 titles listed in the filmography of the most recent book‐length study of authorship theory (Sellors 2010), written by an American‐born but British‐based university lecturer and published by a well‐known British imprint, only five are British or made by a British director. One of these, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966), is identified as an Italian film because of its director’s national origin, even though another, Midnight Cowboy (1969), is – rightly – identified as American despite its director, John Schlesinger, being British.3 In John Gibbs’ (2002) study of mise‐en‐scène, the area of filmmaking thought most likely to provide evidence of an auteur, no British films are mentioned at all. I should state at the outset that this chapter will not involve a rediscovery of lost British authorial talent: I shall not be aiming, in Peter Hutchings’ ­memorable phrase, to bag another auteur for Britain (2000, p. 180). Rather, I want to explore some of the reasons for the neglect by looking at examples of relevant critical practice, drawn mainly from the two key journals mentioned in the first paragraph. I will conclude with some observations on the ways in which modern film scholarship has attempted to come to terms with the question of British film authorship.



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Sequence: Creative Elements Sequence (1946–1952) originated as the magazine of the Oxford University Film Society but soon became an independent, quarterly film journal published in London. From its second issue, editorship of the magazine was taken over by a small group of critics, including Lindsay Anderson, Gavin Lambert, Penelope Houston (both subsequently to become editors of the British Film Institute house journal Sight & Sound), Peter Ericsson, and, latterly, Karel Reisz (who, like Anderson, was to be among the core of filmmakers associated with both the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave). This group was responsible for writing the vast bulk of the magazine’s contents (sometimes pseudonymously), but Anderson was the most outspoken, uncompromising, and contentious contributor; it was he who was most able to formulate his ideas into a coherent ­position which underlay the journal’s critical and editorial policy. Several writers (Hedling 1998, 2003, Gibbs 2001, 2013; Roggen 2013) have ­suggested that Sequence anticipated auteurist writing of the sort that was soon to appear in France (especially in Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951, the year before Sequence ceased publication after only 14 issues) and later in America and Britain (the latter especially in the pages of Movie, to be discussed below). This is true only to a very limited extent. The common factors included an emphasis on the central creative role in the filmmaking process of the director and a willingness to take seriously at least some directors working within the Hollywood studio system. Otherwise, however, both the theoretical premises of the magazines and their critical methodology differ greatly. John Gibbs has specified two basic sub‐types of authorship critique: ‘those grounded in mise‐en‐scène and those which are based on the identification of recurring features across a body of films’ (2013, p. 4). These ‘varieties’ are not of course mutually exclusive: the second may well depend upon or incorporate ­elements of the first (recurrent motifs or patterns in mise‐en‐scène being among the common factors to be traced in a director’s oeuvre). They do, however, correspond to particular emphases in the temporal development of authorship theory and criticism, with the latter ultimately coming to supersede the former when structuralism imposed itself as the dominant discourse. The critical practice published in Sequence is closer to the first sub‐type, though the term mise‐en‐scène was never used by its contributors. Gibbs argues that its equivalent in the magazine is ‘poetry’, a word used (by Anderson in particular) to describe the highest forms of cinema, represented by the work of the directors most frequently praised in the journal: quintessentially John Ford, but also Marcel Carné, René Clair, Jean Cocteau, and Robert Flaherty. Anderson was subsequently to apply the word ‘poet’ to Humphrey Jennings (1954), apparently the only British filmmaker he considered worthy of it, and of course mainly the maker of documentary shorts rather than a director in the mainstream commercial cinema. But references to

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Jennings in Sequence are surprisingly few, and its only review of one of his films, The Cumberland Story (1948), is brief and unfavourable (Anon. 1948a, p. 15); it was not until 1954 that a full‐length appreciation of Jennings by Anderson appeared in Sight & Sound. Sequence was, again up to a point, a defender of the Hollywood system insofar as it gave rise to many of the films that its contributors admired (not just Ford’s but also those of Preston Sturges, Nicholas Ray, Max Ophuls, and even Walt Disney). But the model of the kind of production set‐up the journal would have liked to see in Britain was provided by France, in particular the close collaboration of writers and directors, and directors and other key artists and technicians. Thus, Gavin Lambert wrote: The virtues of the French cinema, in the sound period, have lain in its writers as well as its directors, in Jacques Prévert, Charles Spaak, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, as well as the better known names of Carné, Feyder, Aurent‐Lara. More than this, so many of the best French films have resulted from a number of artists successfully co‐operating, their individual contributions fused by the skill and vision of a few directors. These équipes have been founded sometimes on a partnership between directors and writers, and sometimes when one man has combined these functions in himself, between directors and designers or cameramen. (1949, p. 98)4

The British film industry could point to equivalent équipes, most notably in this era the various partnerships gathered together under the ‘Independent Artists’ umbrella and sponsored by the Rank Organisation: David Lean and Ronald Neame’s Cineguild, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s Individual Artists, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Archers, and so on. However, the studio‐ based model of production operative in Britain, and the kinds of thinking it gave rise to, were held by Anderson to be the principal reasons for the native cinema’s ‘stagnation, and for the deficiencies in even the best British films of the last few years’ (Anderson 1948b, p. 7). Dismissing the notion that an excess of money or an over‐reliance on adaptation was the cause of this situation, he argues: The deficiencies are too fundamental to be explained by any reasons so superficial, or so particular; it is the attitude of film‐makers generally that is responsible. Their films, despite many good intentions, obstinately remain factory products. This is largely because they are produced in factories. (Anderson 1948b)

The Sequence position on film authorship was most explicitly set out in three articles written by Anderson (1947, 1948a, 1950b), which are both the most ‘theoretical’ published in the magazine but also practical in the sense that they directly address the organisation of commercial film production and the challenges that it poses to the making of good films. ‘Angles of Approach’ focuses on the ­compromises entailed in aiming films at the mass audience and on the inhibiting



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‘middlebrowism’ which characterised notions of quality among filmmakers and critics alike. ‘Creative Elements’ addresses the problem of attributing r­ esponsibility to particular members of the production team for aspects of a film’s artistic achievement or failure, and the relative importance of some members of the team over others. Anderson argues for the centrality of ‘the holy of holies, the inextricable Trinity of the film: scriptwriter, cameraman and director’ (1948a, p. 11) and stresses especially the interdependency of director and cinematographer in the realisation of the material provided by the writer: For it is under the director’s guidance that the film is created, transformed from the inadequately expressed idea of the script to a living sequence of sound and images. And for the appearance of every image he is dependent on the cameraman. (Anderson 1948a)

Nevertheless, it is the director who is centrally responsible for unifying and ­integrating the disparate elements that go to make up the film: So in this gathering together, this fusion, there must be a central figure, one man conscious of the relative significance of every shot, the shape and flow of every sequence. But he cannot stand alone. He stands with, dependent on, his author and his cameraman. No doubt in an ideal world the same man would fulfil each function, but it is no use writing criticism for an ideal world. (1948a, p. 12)

This line of argument was developed further in ‘The Director’s Cinema?’, the Sequence article which most obviously prefigures later auteurist writing and which takes Ford as its principal test case of a filmmaker whose personal ‘signature’ is unmistakeable, irrespective of his material. It was published soon after a similar call for a director‐led cinema had appeared in Sight & Sound, now under Lambert’s editorship. ‘The Filmwright and the Audience’ (Dickinson 1950) was written by an already‐practising British director, Thorold Dickinson, whose work had been praised in Sequence. Dickinson harked back to the autocratic control exercised by directors in the silent era as a model for the present. In particular, the director’s visual conception and supervision of editing – the specifically ‘cinematic’ ­elements, as opposed to the literary‐theatrical element of dialogue contributed by the ­scriptwriter – were held to be the prime constituents of a successful film, along with the readiness of audiences to support it. How, then, were these conditions for excellence met in the mainstream British cinema, according to Sequence? In his survey of British production in 1947, Gavin Lambert sees a lack of filmmakers like Carné or Ford, whose greatness lay ‘not only in their experience of, and expertness in, the medium, but in their feeling for values, character, background, for which the film becomes a medium of expression’ – in other words, a lack of ‘poets’ (Lambert 1947, p. 14). Ford’s transformation of commonplace material into a personal work in My Darling Clementine (1946) found

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no equivalent in Britain, where directors were held to be excessively dependent on their screenplays and lacking in personal involvement with their subjects: Minor works like Dead of Night, Temptation Harbour, The Man Within and They Made Me a Fugitive contain material that is initially promising, and embellished from time to time with ingenious and inventive touches. Their atmosphere of mediocrity, and their ultimate dullness, [are] due to the lack of a controlling hand that can explore the material fully and find in it substance for the imagination – as Reed fails to communicate the poetry needed for Odd Man Out, and Lean misses the quintessence of Dickens. (Lambert 1947)

David Lean and Carol Reed, the darlings of mainstream reviewing, were r­epeatedly faulted by Sequence for their films’ impersonality and lack of depth, anticipating distinctions that were to be made by other critics later between ‘true’ auteurs and mere metteurs‐en‐scène. Although in Oliver Twist (1948) Lean’s ‘technical virtuosity is beyond question’, this ultimately is deemed to be insufficient to offset the director’s ‘lack of deeper sympathy with the subject’ (Marlow 1948, p. 38). Similarly, Madeleine (1950) shows Lean to be ‘a classic example of the technician vainly determined to play the artist, the man who can say anything – but with nothing to say’ (Anderson 1950c, p. 16). Reed’s films fared better, with The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949) receiving generally favourable reviews. But their achievements were felt to be limited or compromised: thus in comparison to Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades (1949), The Fallen Idol is said to be ‘even more beautifully finished, physically more perfect; but the pleasure of watching it was that of watching a complex and smoothly running machine. For that satisfaction it repaid several visits but never yielded anything new emotionally’ (Ericsson 1949, p. 83) (Figure 10.1). The Third Man, although ‘demonstrably a brilliant film, distinguished by fine acting and a fascinating counterpoint of image and music’, also suffers from limitations attributed partly to the screenwriter, Graham Greene, for his ‘failure to trace the deeper implications of his chosen subject’, as well as to the director for the trivialisation of a potentially serious theme (Grigs 1950, p. 177). In his assessment of the ‘Creative Elements’, Anderson had stressed that from ‘a script which raises controversial issues and then evades them, which cheats its way out of an emotional problem, which falsifies character, no director on earth can make a wholly satisfactory film’ (1948a, p. 11). But he responded to comments from a private correspondent, later revealed to be Hollywood screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, as well as to a rejoinder to Dickinson’s article written by another Hollywood scenarist, Howard Koch (1950), by explaining that, while the scriptwriter’s role is ­frequently neglected by critics, it is ultimately secondary to that of the director: A good film must draw its original inspiration from a script’s but it may grow to full creative life through various patterns and degrees of collaboration. And the fact



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Figure 10.1  A “director’s cinema”?: Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades (1949). remains that (granted, on his part, the inclination and the capacity) the man most in a position to guide and regulate the expressive resources of the cinema is the director. To that extent it remains, and will remain, a director’s medium. (1950b, p. 37)

Nevertheless, in his own survey of British production circa 1949, ‘British Films: the Descending Spiral’  –  as Hedling (2003, p. 27) notes, a title making mocking ­reference to a recent article by George Stonier in Vogue entitled ‘British Films: the Ascending Spiral’ – Anderson remarks on the ‘failure’ of films that are ‘dispiritingly representative of the present state of the industry – at its most ambitious’. He blames the limitations of scriptwriters as well as directors and indeed the lack of writing ability among directors: Although there are a few exceptional directors working in Britain today, and not a few promising or capable ones, time and again their films break down, through clumsy dialogue, poverty of invention, lack of dramatic structure. It is creditable that directors should feel it necessary to participate in the scripting of their films, but useless if they are not writers themselves, or have no competent scriptwriters with whom to collaborate. (1949a, p. 11)

Yet in his two‐page review of Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), with a screenplay co‐written by the director, Anderson notes the ‘initial advantage of an

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unusually well‐written script’ but finds that ‘the film in general lacks a visual style equal to its script … visual flow, expressiveness of cutting and set‐up, seem largely absent’ (1949d, pp. 130–131). So again, there is a failure of realisation, of ‘fusion’, even when the director is also a skilled writer. The British filmmakers for whom Anderson reserved particular ire were jointly credited as both writers and directors as well as producers; the pages of Sequence are littered with hostile references to them. An anonymous review of The Red Shoes (1948) states: ‘Few directors have striven so consistently as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to be novel, experimental, surprising; and few have been so consistently unsuccessful. However their subjects vary, the qualities of the films remain the same, their failure constant’ (Anon. 1948b, p. 17). The ballet sequence is compared unfavourably with the treatment of musical numbers in Vincente Minnelli’s work and the film as a whole is said to be characteristic of Powell and Pressburger ‘in its extravagant incoherence, its misapplied ingenuity of treatment’ (1948b, p. 18). The prospect of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) is greeted with similar disdain: ‘Powell and Pressburger’s threatened operatic companion‐piece to The Red Shoes is now in production. Once bitten but still not shy enough’ (Boule Minor 1950, p. 4). Although these latter pieces are unattributed or pseudonymous, they are surely Anderson’s. Gavin Lambert later described how his own ambivalent but slightly more sympathetic account of the filmmakers’ work (giving sole credit to Powell as director, Pressburger having been assumed to be largely responsible for their scripts) had been amended by Anderson to introduce an additional note of reservation. The published version reads partly as follows: It is perhaps Powell’s greatest virtue that his work is at once recognisable by his faults. Since 49th Parallel most of his films have been repetitive in form and style, and while on the surface they have become more smooth, confident, their creative ­deficiencies have remained the same – dilatoriness, lack of development, an element of kitsch. But behind the irritating side‐issues and occasionally pompous narrative devices, there is a distinct sensibility and a feeling for the poetry of natural scenery and its relation to character. When he abandons this, the measure of kitsch increases. A Matter of Life and Death is a very arid and pretentious work. Black Narcissus has less trumpery, but is unfortunately almost as boring … Yet one still feels that Powell, though he has never made an entirely satisfactory film, remains potentially one of the most interesting British directors. (Lambert 1947, p. 12)

According to Lambert, the modifier ‘potentially’ in the last line had been inserted into the page proofs by Anderson without the writer’s knowledge or approval (2000, p. 41).5 The most substantial director study contributed to Sequence by Anderson himself did in fact concern a British filmmaker, albeit one who had deserted to



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Hollywood: Alfred Hitchcock. The article’s most positive comments are reserved for the British phase of Hitchcock’s career, which is praised for its realism and observation of ordinary life within the context of the thriller‐melodrama. Anderson credits Hitchcock as ‘a man of the cinema – one who has approached the film as an art through the film as an industry’ and whose work exhibits ‘the characteristics of a born story‐teller’ (1949c, pp. 114–115). But with the move to Hollywood, Anderson feels that stylistic virtuosity came to assert itself over both authentic atmosphere and storytelling. Although Hitchcock’s possession of the American quality of ‘flair for popular showmanship’ (1949c, p. 113), generally lacking in the British cinema, had earlier been noted with approval, this transition is presented as a Faustian pact: Hitchcock’s best films are in many ways very English, in their humour, lack of ­sentimentality, their avoidance of the grandiose and the elaborately fake. And these qualities were threatened when, in 1939, he succumbed to temptation and signed a contract to work in Hollywood for David Selznick. … The Gaumont British melodramas succeed as works of art (however minor) because they attain a perfect, satisfying balance between content and style; the enlargement which Hitchcock’s style has undergone in Hollywood has been accompanied by no equivalent intensifying or deepening of sensibility or subject matter. (1949c, pp. 119, 123)

Like Lambert’s for Powell, Anderson’s admiration for Hitchcock is heavily circumscribed: the director is said to depend heavily on his scripts, finding no equivalent in America for his British screenwriter Charles Bennett except for Thornton Wilder, the scenarist of Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock’s ‘best’ Hollywood film and the only one ‘which might be construed as an attempt – his last – to justify himself as a serious director’ (1949c, pp. 120–121). In neither the British nor the American period is Hitchcock seen to embody the qualities expected of seriousness. Anderson notes that Hitchcock’s brief wartime return to Britain to make the propaganda shorts Aventure Malgache (1944) and Bon Voyage (1944) ‘inspired no renaissance of style, no return to reality’ (1949c, p. 121) and anticipates none with the director’s two most recent ventures, also made in British studios (1949c, p. 123). His subsequent capsule notice (1950a) of Under Capricorn (1949) confirmed his worst fears; a Sight & Sound review of Stage Fright (1950) by Simon Harcourt‐Smith (1950) is virtually a point‐by‐point recap of Anderson’s career article, suggesting that the critical ethos inhabited by both writers predetermined their negative judgement. For all their emphasis on the centrality of the director’s role, with few exceptions, the articles and reviews in Sequence rarely exhibit the approaches most associated with auteurist writing: the reading of a film in terms of its director’s artistic personality or characteristic ‘world view’ and a close analysis of visual style. In ‘Creative Elements’, Anderson notes the habit recently developed by reviewers in

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the mainstream press of referring to films by the names of their directors without exhibiting any clear understanding of what a director did:6 For a long time neglected by all save the cognoscenti, the director has at last come into his own. Critics who wish to qualify as ‘serious’ mention directors frequently, usually after comments on the story and acting, and in combination with some approving but colourless adverb – as if conscious of their importance but mystified as to their exact position in the scheme of things. A critic in a London weekly thus describes The First Gentleman as ‘unconvincing,’ ‘unreal and, alas, boring,’ but finally pronounces: ‘The direction by Cavalcanti is good.’ Miss Graham is on the right track, but has evidently not advanced very far along it: competent criticism  –  merely a ­syllogism, after all, for full appreciation  –  demands the capacity to analyse, to ­comprehend ‘what’ through ‘how.’ (1948a, p. 8)

Yet in truth many of the reviews published in Sequence do not go much beyond this. The capsule notices appearing in the regular column ‘As They Go’ identify the director in parenthesis following the title of the film, but often that is his only mention. Direction, often characterised by an impressionistic, generalising assertion, is rarely discussed in specific detail even in the longer reviews. Anderson’s own review (1949b) of The History of Mr. Polly (1949), covering a page and a quarter, does not mention the director, Anthony Pelissier, until the last paragraph; and in his favourable, two‐page notice for Bernard Miles’ Chance of a Lifetime (1950), Anderson observes only that the ‘direction is very craftsmanlike’ (Anderson 1950d, p. 40) – an ‘approving but colourless’ adjective, perhaps? For a more rigorous analysis of ‘“what” through “how”’, we must turn instead to the writing of a later generation of critics in a journal which has much in common with Sequence but also much that is distinctly different.

Movie, Directors and Critics Like Sequence, Movie (1962–1972, 1975–2000) came out of Oxford. Though it was created as an independent journal, it was preceded in eight successive issues of the student magazine Oxford Opinion (1960–1961) by a films section edited by Ian Cameron and featuring among its regular contributors V.F. Perkins and Mark Shivas, who together with Paul Mayersberg were the co‐founders of Movie. The tone, interests, approach and even design of the journal were thus established before Movie itself came along to embody and develop them further. Once founded, Movie was published in 11 almost‐monthly issues dated from June 1962 to July/ August 1963; the first of many hiatuses was followed by its reappearance in 1965 as a quarterly, but after only three issues it was again suspended, to be resumed in 1968 and interrupted once more in 1972. It is this run of 19 issues on which I will concentrate in this discussion. Movie returned in a smaller format in 1975 and



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appeared sporadically over the next 25 years, with increasingly longer gaps ­between each issue; its last was numbered 36, though in fact only 13 physical ­editions appeared in this later format, four of these being double issues. In a review by Tony Rayns of a collection of writings by the late Raymond Durgnat, an occasional contributor to Movie, the journal is said to be characterised by ‘reflex auteurism’ (2014, p. 105). This is unjust. ‘Reflex’ suggests an unthinking automatism, recalling early criticisms of the magazine (and its precursor in Oxford Opinion) that it was slavishly following a party line set by Cahiers du Cinéma. But not only was Movie’s critical practice as distinct from that of Cahiers as it was from Sequence and indeed Sight & Sound (its ‘inverted twin’, according to Rayns), its ­conception of film authorship was also somewhat distinct, as it was from later versions of the auteur theory propagated elsewhere, and even varied from ­ ­contributor to contributor. There were, however, other similarities between Movie and Sequence besides the Oxford connection. Both journals were the work of Young Turks hostile to the mainstream British cinema of their day and especially to the recent films and filmmakers most praised by the established press. Indeed, mainstream film criticism itself was equally lambasted by both groups. In his editorial introduction to the first films section in Oxford Opinion, Ian Cameron had thrown down the gauntlet: Film criticism in Britain is dead. Hardly a single piece of perceptive criticism has been written here in the last few years. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to believe that British criticism has ever been alive. Perhaps in the good old days of ‘Sequence’… (1960, p. 36)7

Compare this to V.F. Perkins’ opening gambit in the swingeing polemic which fronted the launch issue of Movie: Five years ago the ineptitude of British films was generally acknowledged. The stiff upper lip movie was a standard target for critical scorn. But now the British cinema has come to grips with Reality. We have had a break‐through, a renaissance, a New Wave … All we can see is a change of attitude, which disguises the fact that the British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive. Our films have improved, if at all, only in their intentions. We are still unable to find evidence of artistic sensibilities in working order. (Perkins 1962a, p. 3)8

As evidence, Perkins cites such films as Basil Dearden’s All Night Long (1961), Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), and John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962). It is specifically with the direction of these films that Perkins takes issue. In the case of Schlesinger, for example: the first ‘love’ scene in A Kind of Loving is filmed mainly in a medium shot which shows us the boy and girl necking in a park shelter. On the walls behind and to the side of them we see the usual graphiti [sic] of names and hearts. The setting makes,

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in this way, a fairly obvious but relevant comment on the action. But Schlesinger has no appreciation of the power of his décor; he destroys the whole effect by moving his camera to take the actors out of the shot and isolate the inscriptions in meaningless close‐up. As if he hadn’t done enough damage he continues the movement until we come to rest on a totally gratuitous detail: a poster forbidding mutilation of the shelter. (Perkins 1962a, p. 5)

There is nothing in Sequence quite like this sort of detailed dissection of set‐ups, staging, camera movements, and so on. The grounds for judgement are presented in the form of concrete description, not impressionistic evocation. This is the critical method that Movie brought to film analysis, one which distinguished it from both previous and contemporaneous rival practitioners. It was this method also that had provoked an extensive debate in English‐language critical circles following the appearance of the first film writings in Oxford Opinion, a debate regarding both the manner in which criticism should be written and the permissible criteria for evaluation: form or content, style or subject, how or what. Movie, like Sequence before it, argued that in art how is what; but unlike its predecessor, Movie explicitly analysed ‘how’ and made this an explicit subject (‘what’) of its exegesis. For this reason, its writers often found themselves accused of being dilettantish and ‘uncommitted’  –  uncommitted, that is, to declared social and political values, instead seeming to be narrowly preoccupied with purely aesthetic ones.9 Perkins’ article, a calling‐card for the journal’s iconoclasm, has also led to its being perceived as hostile to British cinema generally. Certainly, his argument is that the national industry did not provide fertile ground for production of the calibre of films that regularly appeared from the cinemas of certain other countries (not just America but also France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden). Perkins exonerates the economic state of the British industry from blame for this, as largely the same commercial conditions applied in America; instead he attributes the cause to ‘the general climate of opinion in Britain, and in particular to the British concept of The Good Film’ as well as the ‘new sense of responsibility’ reflected in the New Wave (Perkins 1962a, pp. 4–5).10 He did cite a small number of British films that rose above the general standard of mediocrity, but many of these were made by American directors based in Britain, most of them temporarily. An article by Cameron published in the journal’s second issue is perhaps the most widely quoted proof of its auteurism. In ‘Films, Directors and Critics’, Cameron states explicitly the basic assumption shared by the contributors: that the director is the author of a film, the person who gives it any distinctive quality that it may have … On the whole we accept the cinema of directors, although without going to the farthest‐out extremes of la politique des auteurs which makes it difficult to think of a bad director making a good film and almost impossible to think of a good director making a bad one. (1962, p. 5)



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The article is partly a protest at the prevalent reviewers’ prejudice against taking popular American films seriously as art, and Hollywood directors seriously as ­artists. The argument culminates in a comparison of three war films as a demonstration of critical method concerned to demonstrate good and bad direction. The ‘good’ example is Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962); the ‘bad’ ones are David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone (1961). This use of ‘bad’ British films to make the case for the recognition of ‘good’ American direction tends further to reinforce the widespread impression that the Movie ethos was anti‐British. Even more contentious than either of these pieces was an item, perhaps the most notorious to appear in any issue of Movie, which accompanied Perkins’ article. The ‘talent histogram’ (Anon 1962) is a chart, unsigned but presumably collectively authored by Cameron and his associate editors, setting out in starkly diagrammatic form the magazine’s relative estimation of 204 currently active directors (72 of them British, the rest American).11 Their names are arrayed in two rows, according to nationality, and six columns, according to their respective abilities: in order of priority, the ranked columns are labelled Great, Brilliant, Very Talented, Talented, Competent or Ambitious, and The Rest. There are no British directors considered Great and only two American (one of them being the Hollywood‐based Hitchcock); the highest‐ranked ‘British’ director is the American émigré Joseph Losey (Brilliant), followed by the Argentinian‐born Hugo Fregonese (Very Talented) and three labelled Talented: Robert Hamer, Seth Holt, and Karel Reisz. All of these had received more‐or‐less favourable mention in Perkins’ article. The remaining 67 British names are crammed into the bottom two categories. The American directors are more evenly distributed across the chart, with a total of 56 names in the second, third, and fourth ­columns compared with the British 5. Perkins’ and Cameron’s articles, along with the talent histogram, created the impression, still prevalent today, that the journal was ‘primarily devoted to the celebration of Hollywood films’ and that it was dismissive of the national industry due to the ‘lack of genuine auteurs working in the British cinema’ (Hill 2010, p. 299). In fact, neither of these claims is strictly true. In the first 19 issues of the magazine there were as many articles and reviews concerning European films and filmmakers as Hollywood.12 All but two of these issues contain substantial material on British films. Long – in some cases article‐length – reviews of British films included Perkins on Clive Donner’s Some People (1962); Shivas on Andrew L. Stone’s The Password Is Courage (1962); Mayersberg on Leo McCarey’s The Devil Never Sleeps (1962), Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1963) and Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim (1965); Gavin Millar on Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963); Charles Barr on Losey’s King & Country (1964) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which was also reviewed by Peter von Bagh; and Cameron on Alexander Mackendrick’s Sammy Going South (1963) and Antony Balch’s avant‐garde short

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Towers Open Fire (1963), along with a second article on This Sporting Life. With the exception of the last‐mentioned (a rare ‘knocking piece’ marked as such by its brazen title, ‘Against This Sporting Life’), all of these are generally positive. Issues 2–11 included a regular column of selective, mostly anonymous capsule reviews, initially headed ‘Advertisements’ and later ‘Recommendations’; British films noticed in them included Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), Caspar Wrede’s Private Potter (1962), Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963), and Seth Holt’s Station Six – Sahara (1963). From issue 12 onwards this column was replaced by the non‐ committal ‘Other Films’, and titles covered there are as liable to be reprimanded as endorsed; but even so there was praise for Mackendrick’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), Albert Finney’s Charlie Bubbles (1968), Losey’s Secret Ceremony (1968) and Anderson’s If …. (1968). A pattern can readily be discerned: a preference for American and European directors working in Britain (McCarey, Losey, Brooks, Stone, Polanski, Kubrick, even the American‐born Mackendrick); and for relative neophytes rather than industry veterans (Donner, Anderson, Balch, Wrede, Littlewood, Finney, Polanski again). Nevertheless, there is no sign here of blanket indifference to the national product, though it could be argued that the magazine was being deliberately provocative, even perverse, in focusing on what most critics would have considered marginalia and ignoring those British films and filmmakers that were most celebrated elsewhere (a point that could equally be made about Sequence). The fact that most of these films were not only reviewed but evaluated positively is partly due to Movie’s governing principle. The journal’s editorial policy was to review only films that its contributors admired. Their admiration need not be unqualified, and indeed most articles and reviews included a balanced assessment of films’ merits and demerits. But the policy was intended to ensure that critics generally conveyed enthusiasm rather than antagonism, as had often been the case in Sequence. The rationale underlying this policy was discussed in a roundtable meeting involving the journal’s four main contributors; the initial exposition is Cameron’s: Although our critical methods and tastes differ considerably, our motives in producing Movie are, I think, identical. A film’s chances of being accepted, and even of being made, depend largely on the critical climate at the time. In producing Movie, we are trying to create the climate necessary for the films we ourselves may make in the future. I hope that it is implicit in the articles we write in Movie, that our aim is not to carve out careers for ourselves as critics, but to make films. Our aim is to provide people with the means for making their own judgements. We try to explain what we see in a film in order that a reader may measure this against his own experience of a film, and make his own judgement, rather than providing him with a ready‐made judgement. (Cameron et al. 1963, p. 33)

In fact, of the four, only Paul Mayersberg (mainly as a screenwriter) and Mark Shivas (as a producer, initially for television) would subsequently go into



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filmmaking; Perkins became a university academic and Cameron remained in publishing. But the aim of laying the intellectual and cultural groundwork for a future cinema of their own aligned the group at least in principle with the Cahiers critics who had formed the French nouvelle vague, as well as the former Sequence and Sight & Sound critics who were the nucleus of the British New Wave. The policy of favourable coverage did not have the unwavering assent of all the  journal’s core contributors. Perkins, in particular, argued for the value of discussing films we don’t like that others do. Why, for example, did we ignore Lawrence of Arabia? The great majority of critics at least claim to have enjoyed it enormously. Surely discussion of why, for us, Lawrence is a bad, boring film would open some doors for readers. (Perkins 1962b, p. 34)

Cameron’s position was that a positive approach saved the critic from the trap of attributing to the director unfulfilled intentions: If you’re being hostile, it’s unfair to lumber the director with intentions which he may not admit to, and then attack him for failing in them. You’re on much less firm ground than when describing a sensation which you actually got from a film, whether the director intended it or not. (Cameron 1962)

Even Perkins concurred in the necessity of avoiding prescriptiveness: We are helping people not to know which are the right and wrong films, but to see what’s in a film. We must draw the line at any claim that Movie is establishing the Great Tradition, Leavis‐wise, in the cinema. This is poison. We’re not concerned with the education of taste, but with the education of awareness. (Perkins, 1962b)

In addition to its essays and reviews about individual films, Movie published a­ rticles on and interviews with particular directors. In some cases, these extended to special sections comprising multiple articles and/or detailed filmographies. None of these concerned British‐based filmmakers, but Richard Lester (American‐ born, though all his films to that point had been made in Britain) was the subject of both an analytical article and a lengthy interview, while career articles were devoted to Michael Powell and Michael Reeves and interviews were conducted with Joseph Losey and Clive Donner. Interviews had rarely been published in Sequence but all 19 issues of Movie discussed here contain at least one and sometimes several. The pattern for these was set by an earlier interview conducted with Losey and published in a joint issue of Oxford Opinion and its Cambridge counterpart Granta (Cameron et al. 1961). Like later pieces published in Movie, it involved putting detailed questions to the director about his creative decisions and the production circumstances regarding a particular film – in this case, The Criminal (1960). Perkins later commented that ‘interviewing Losey and discovering the depth of

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detail to which the film could be designed and intended … acted as an enormously strong validation of the idea that film makers knew what they were doing’ (Gibbs 2013, p. 149). In Perkins’ subsequent analysis of Some People, excerpts from an interview with Donner are interwoven with the critic’s discussion of the film itself (Perkins 1962b). Thus, interviews served as an adjunct to, and extension of, criticism. This acknowledgement of the director’s own reflections on his work, and their incorporation into critical analysis, suggest that, for Movie, authorship was a fact before it was a theory.13 Two British director studies appearing in the journal were, however, written without benefit of their subject’s direct input: Raymond Durgnat’s on Michael Powell, published under the pseudonym O.O. Green, and Robin Wood’s on the recently deceased Michael Reeves. The latter is the only Movie piece on British cinema specifically to define its director subject as ‘an auteur, with a coherent (if still somewhat raw) view of life’ (Wood 1969–70, p. 3). One of Wood’s concerns in the article is to establish Reeves’ part‐authorship of Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a film on which he is credited only with a subordinate role (Wood says assistant director, though Halligan 2003 states second unit director). Wood’s method is to make a qualitative distinction between the second half of the film and the first, attributing the better part to Reeves, who ‘is said to have taken over altogether the last fortnight’s shooting’. The attribution is based solely on ‘deduction, on stylistic and thematic grounds’, and the analysis of these sequences leads Wood to conclude that the film ‘offers a salutary reminder of the supremacy of pure mise‐en‐scène in the art of cinema’ (Wood 1969–70, p. 2). Though Durgnat/Green does not use the term ‘auteur’, he too is concerned to outline the recurrent thematic characteristics of Powell’s films, which, unsurprisingly, impress him more favourably than they did Lindsay Anderson. While tracing the stylistic and ideological patterns that typify the director’s work, he makes nuanced evaluative distinctions between what he sees as the stronger and the weaker films and is concerned throughout to rescue Powell from the reputation of being ‘a “technician’s director”, a virtuoso of the special effect’, without depth or substance (Green 1965, p. 17). It is perhaps worth stating that Powell’s career at this point – both critically and within the industry – was at a low ebb, and that Durgnat was staking out new ground in seeking to re‐evaluate a filmmaker all but forgotten. Nevertheless, he is careful not to overstate his claims, avoids asserting any of Powell’s films as an outright masterpiece and concludes with a paragraph in which he suggests that, as well as the director’s sensibility, they also ‘shed not a little light on English thought and the English soul’ (Green 1965, p. 20). Although these and other contributors to Movie  –  notably Mayersberg  –  are concerned to place individual films within the framework of their directors’ oeuvre, the general paucity of explicit discussion of auteurism should serve as fair warning that the hunt for auteurs is not what Movie was about; rather it was the quest for good films and for talent that preoccupied its writers.



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British Authors and Auteurs While journalism, film marketing, and fan cultures from the 1960s onwards easily assimilated the director‐as‐author into their own discourses, they remained innocent of the extent to which that figure was increasingly becoming discredited in academia. Academic film studies had scarcely existed when Movie first appeared, though several of its contributors were to play a major role in shaping the new discipline, which introduced new protocols drawn from fields such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. The publication in 1969 of Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, with its structuralist approach to the ‘auteur theory’, made a break from a critical practice which attributed films to the director’s conscious agency in favour of the auteur as a structural pattern constructed rather than merely deduced by the critic – one of which the director was, almost of necessity, unconscious (Wollen 1998, p. 115). It was thus possible for Ian Christie, compiling a collection of articles to mark a British Film Institute season of films by Powell and Pressburger, to remark in his Introduction: The auteur is not the director who appears more in control of his films than another; ‘he’ is more like a principle of coherence, a product of ‘reading’ certain films within a particular rubric, than a peculiarly gifted or fortunate director (although he may be these as well) … Historically, auteur theory proved to be an enormously productive phase in film and cultural studies, and it is apparent that many of its findings are of permanent value. But it seems equally clear today that this no longer holds true: the search for auteurs has become largely sterile, and the characterisation of films in terms of traditional auteur analysis is at the expense of what now appears to be more productive lines of inquiry. (Christie, 1978, pp. 1–2)14

It is of course ironic that this should appear in the first book to be devoted to the two filmmakers who constitute the great success story of auteurism in relation to British cinema. Having been patronised by Sequence, partly rescued in Movie and other small‐circulation magazines, but generally forgotten by the film‐ cultural establishment, Powell and Pressburger  –  especially Michael Powell as director – underwent a lengthy process of rediscovery and re‐evaluation, marked by such building blocks of canonical status as in‐depth interviews, retrospective seasons, archival restorations, academic monographs and indeed regular appearances on Film Studies screening programmes. It is now commonplace and uncontroversial to speak of Powell as the greatest British filmmaker largely to remain in Britain, rather than as a pariah excluded from the pantheon through an excess of bad taste. This may in itself be read as a refutation of the ‘death of the auteur’; the process by which Powell and Pressburger have been reconstructed as auteurs

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could easily be subjected to an analysis comparable to Robert Kapsis’ study of the ‘making of ’ Hitchcock (1992). Perhaps the first step in this process was Raymond Durgnat’s ground‐breaking A Mirror for England (1970), in the course of which he reworked and expanded his 1965 Movie article on Powell. Although not primarily concerned with authorship, Durgnat’s book had the dual distinction of recognising more unsung British directors’ achievements than had ever been acknowledged in one source before, while also moving the subject of discussion on from the individual characteristics of particular filmmakers to the wider social and aesthetic cultures of which they were a part. This ‘culturalist’ imperative, not rejecting authorship but including it along with other agencies and influences as part of a broader set of concerns, has since become a central strain of critical writing about British cinema, exemplified by, for  instance, Andrew Moor’s book on Powell and Pressburger (Moor 2012). Significantly, this latter monograph was published as part of a series entitled ‘Cinema and Society’.15 The ‘more productive lines of inquiry’ followed by other recent scholars also include exploration of the industrial conditions of production and the practical realities of filmmaking, matters which certainly concerned the contributors to Sequence and Movie but which have become more rather than less accessible over the passage of time due to the increasing availability for study of primary documents in libraries and archives. Rather than relying on deductive rationalisation based entirely on film texts, modern critics and historians have instead conducted empirical research into the actual division of labour in particular production set‐ups. Benjamin Halligan (2003), for instance, has established that the parts of Castle of the Living Dead attributed by Robin Wood to Michael Reeves were in fact the work of the film’s credited (American) director, Warren Kiefer, and that Reeves’ creative involvement in it was minimal. The impulse to establish directorial candidates for auteur status has given way to recognition of the creative contributions of other members of the production team. Thus, Charles Barr (1999), in analysing Hitchcock’s British films, not only recognises the importance of his screenwriters (as Lindsay Anderson had earlier) but also uncovered the decisive formative role of scenarist Eliot Stannard  –  a figure entirely neglected in previous critical literature – in shaping Hitchcock’s authorship at an early stage.16 Authorship studies have also branched out to embrace other key artists: an issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2.1, 2001) on the theme of visual style includes an article on Powell and Pressburger but is mainly devoted to essays on the work of production designers  –  art direction rather than the art of direction.17 Andrew Spicer has written critical/ biographical studies of the screenwriter Richard Curtis (Spicer 2007) – under the telling title ‘The Author as Author’ – and the producers Sydney Box (Spicer 2006) and Michael Klinger (Spicer and McKenna 2013), the former published in a series of monographs otherwise devoted exclusively to directors (including also Halligan on Reeves).



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This series, ‘British Film Makers’, which at time of writing now runs to 20 titles, might at first glance seem to embody a revival and revalidation of the auteurist impulse; one of the more recent volumes, on Lindsay Anderson, even carries the subtitle Cinema Authorship (Izod et  al. 2012). Yet the series editors’ General Foreword, as well as warning that individual writers are ‘not bound to any one ­theoretical methodology’, also indicates the extent to which the narrow model of traditional auteurist criticism has been left behind: Although the series is director‐oriented, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film‐ makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects of which go towards the construction of a national cinema.18

The mention of ‘recurring themes and structures’ here recalls both traditional and structuralist versions of auteurism, but it is the last phrase which identifies the series’ determining discourse. Nevertheless, taken together, these rigorously researched books go some way to addressing Peter Hutchings’ (2000) plea for film direction to be understood as a pragmatic career path – a job – as well as a form of artistic agency.19 The first published volume in the British Film Makers series was written by one of the series’ editors, Brian McFarlane (the other being Neil Sinyard), and set the tone by tackling a director whose claim to attention would not have occurred to previous generations of critics: Lance Comfort, a maker primarily of humble B pictures (McFarlane 1999). The desire to elevate Comfort’s critical status emanates not just from McFarlane’s sense of his particular value – though that is made clear enough – but also from a concern to rescue this whole neglected area of production from obscurity by developing an approach more appreciative of the multiple influences operative in the industry.20 Like many a previous writer, McFarlane was himself influenced by a cultural theorist from abroad: in his case, Pierre Bourdieu, whose work on ‘cultural production’ has become an important point of reference for recent historians of British cinema, manifested in their frequent adoption of his concepts and vocabulary. The introduction to McFarlane’s monograph helps to explain why this might be so: Bourdieu’s interest is in French literature and art, not at all in cinema, but the value of the concept of habitus in film study is that it releases us from the unproductive elitism of auteurist criticism. This latter has celebrated the individual film‐maker as the author of his films at the expense of those other interacting elements – social, cultural, economic – which elaborate the idea of the agent as being more than an individual film‐maker practising his art. In relation to cinema, the agent or habitus

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may not always refer to a director; it may equally be applied to a producer, or a studio, or production company or to some combination of these, and this study will take such potential influences into account. (1999, pp. 2–3)21

I would not deny that the culturalist and historicist trends of recent British cinema scholarship are both productive and progressive; much valuable knowledge has been gained by extending the focus of history and criticism from foreground auteurs to background context, from agency to influence, ‘habitus’ to ‘field’. Yet occasionally I feel that something has been lost in the process – something represented, in their different ways, by both Sequence and Movie. I would like modern scholars to show a greater readiness to make aesthetic judgements – hostile judgements, if necessary, expressed with the bracing acerbity of a Lindsay Anderson or Victor Perkins. The contextualising impulse, while revealing much that was beyond the purview of traditional auteurism, can also lead to a non‐committal blandness, when a sharp rebuke would serve better to stimulate critical – in the sense of evaluative, not merely interpretative – discussion and debate. We have lost something of the opinionated engagement communicated by the best writings in those often infuriating but excitingly angry, passionately committed magazines. What we could do with now is more, and more heated, polemical arguments over talent.

Notes 1 See, for example, Caughie (1981), the standard anthology on the subject, which contains articles by Edward Buscombe, Ian Cameron, Lindsay Anderson, Robin Wood, Peter Wollen, Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith, Stephen Heath, Nick Browne, and Pam Cook, among others. 2 I am not forgetting the three features and two shorts Hitchcock made in Britain following the start of his transatlantic exile, but the features were made for and released by major American companies (Warner Bros. and Universal). 3 The remaining three British films cited are My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978), which are most often (and are by Sellors) bundled together as a single text, the Bill Douglas Trilogy. 4 The filmmakers praised here by Lambert were precisely those who would later be attacked by François Truffaut (1976) as the egregiously literary ‘Tradition of Quality’, overly dependent on their scripts. 5 In his television self‐portrait Is That All There Is? (BBC, 1993), Anderson is asked if he likes Powell’s films and answers in the affirmative, though he does not say why. He reviewed the posthumous second volume of Powell’s autobiography for the Daily Telegraph, praising it extravagantly. 6 In her Sunday Times review of Brief Encounter (1945), Dilys Powell neglects to mention David Lean’s name even once, attributing the film’s authorship (and implicitly its direction, also not specifically mentioned) entirely to its co‐screenwriter/co‐producer: ‘The whole story is told with the technical adroitness we expect from Mr. Coward’ (Powell 1989, p. 54). For a discussion of Coward’s authorship and Brief Encounter, see Medhurst (1991).



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7

Cameron was later to admit that in fact he had not actually read Sequence (Gibbs 2013, p. 125, n. 77). 8 In his Introduction to a collection of articles from Movie, Cameron defends the journal against the contemporary (1962) assumption that ‘Cahiers now had a branch in London’ and makes explicit the point being made here: Movie’s appearance was prompted not so much by ideas from abroad as by the absence of them at home. The magazine and its attitudes were a response to the situation which we found in British film criticism and the British cinema, both of them in lamentable states which, we thought, had some connection. (1972, p. 6)

9 10

11 12

13

14 15

The only articles on British cinema included in the anthology are those on Losey’s The Damned and King & Country. The ‘critical debate’ over the methods of film criticism, along with an earlier debate over ‘committed’ criticism (begun by two articles by Lindsay Anderson appearing in Sight & Sound), is discussed at length in Gibbs (2013). Perkins attributes this ‘new sense of responsibility’ to the influence of ‘the “Sequence” generation’ (1962, p. 5), though in fact the ‘committed’ position outlined by Anderson as a critic (see note 5) and arguably embodied in the New Wave films of Reisz and Richardson sprang more from the ethos of Sight & Sound than of Sequence, which was as centrally preoccupied with film aesthetics as Movie. On the ‘talent histogram’ and its wider implications, see Hutchings (2001). Of the films given relatively long reviews or article‐length analyses (some more than one) in the first 19 issues of the magazine, 44 were European, 37 American, 11 British and 2 Japanese. Of the directors given extended studies (some covered in more than one issue or in special multi‐article sections), 11 were American‐based, 4 European, 3 British or British‐based, and 1 Japanese. Of the filmmakers interviewed at length (again, some more than once), 19 were American‐based, 8 European, 3 British or British‐based, and 1 Japanese. Several of the Hollywood filmmakers studied or interviewed had made films in Britain, some of which were critiqued at length, including Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958). These are not included in the tally above. Perkins’ chapter ‘Direction and Authorship’ in his book Film as Film (Perkins 1972) – a more fully developed exposition of the critical position he brought to Movie – is for me the single most persuasive account of the director’s right to be considered a film’s author. Its stress on the role of the director in unifying the contributions of other creative workers echoes Anderson (1948a) but provides a more convincing demonstration of the principle through its application to particular examples. The plethora of material published subsequently on Powell and Pressburger includes a traditional auteur study written by Christie himself (Christie 1985). The culturalist trend is evidenced by the titles of books devoted to other British filmmakers: Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Burton et al. 1997); Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinema (Aitken 2000). Even Robin Wood, in updating his landmark 1965 book on Hitchcock (which had dismissed the British period in a single paragraph) was able partially to recant his earlier hardline auteurism and admit ‘that there are valid reasons for examining a given body of work (from a filmmaker, a genre, a period, a national cinema) quite apart from its sense of artistic value – a consideration that did not occur to the author of Hitchcock’s Films’ (1989, p. 231).

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16 Both this and Barr’s Ealing Studios (1998) were published by Ian Cameron and each is designated ‘A Movie Book’. Only one article published in Movie issues 20–36 (1975– 2000, when the magazine was perhaps more the product of academic scholarship than journalism) was an analysis of a British film: Michael Powell’s 1960 solo effort Peeping Tom, a favourite text of specialist magazines. But there was extensive coverage of British television, often the work of Barr and focusing mainly on the role of the screenwriter 17 In their introduction, issue editors Sue Harper and Vincent Porter state that ‘the visual styles of the Archers’ films are greater than the sum of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’ (Harper and Porter 2001, p. 15). 18 This Foreword by the series editors (Brian McFarlane and Neil Sinyard, themselves leading scholars of British cinema and contributors of volumes to the series) appears in all the books published under the British Film Makers imprint by Manchester University Press. MUP also publishes series on American and French film directors. 19 A similar, welcome stress on what directors actually do also marks two such otherwise divergent recent accounts of film authorship as Gibbs (2006) and Sellors (2010), though neither is especially interested in British cinema. 20 This interest is further developed in other writings, notably Chibnall and McFarlane (2009). 21 Chibnall’s volume on J. Lee Thompson (Chibnall 2000) also acknowledges an explicit debt to Bourdieu, who is cited or quoted outside the British Film Makers series in, for example, Burton, O’Sullivan and Wells’s (1997) edited collection on Dearden, and Moor’s monograph on Powell and Pressburger (Moor 2012).

References Aitken, Ian (2000). Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinema. Trowbridge: Flick Books. Anderson, Lindsay (1947). Angles of approach. Sequence 2: 5–8. Anderson, Lindsay (1948a). Creative elements. Sequence 5: 8–12. Anderson, Lindsay (1948b). A possible solution. Sequence 3: 7–10. Anderson, Lindsay (1949a). British films: the descending spiral. Sequence 7: 6–11. Anderson, Lindsay (1949b). The History of Mr. Polly. Sequence 7: 41–42. Anderson, Lindsay (1949c). The films of Alfred Hitchcock. Sequence 9: 113–124. Anderson, Lindsay (1949d). Kind Hearts and Coronets. Sequence 9: 130–131. Anderson, Lindsay (1950a). Under Capricorn. Sequence 10: 154–155. Anderson, Lindsay (1950b). The director’s cinema? Sequence 12: 6–11. 37. Anderson, Lindsay (1950c). As they go: Madeleine. Sequence 11: 16. Anderson, Lindsay (1950d). Chance of a Lifetime. Sequence 11: 39–40. Anderson, Lindsay (1954). Only connect: some aspects of the work of Humphrey Jennings. Sight & Sound 23 (4): 181–186. Anon. (1948a). As they go. Sequence 4: 14–19. Anon. (1948b). As they go. Sequence 5: 14–19. Anon. (1962). The talent histogram. Movie 1: 8–9. Anon. (1963). Cape Fear. Movie 7: 36.



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Barr, Charles (1998). Ealing Studios, 3e. Moffat: Cameron & Hollis. Barr, Charles (1999). English Hitchcock. Moffat: Cameron & Hollis. Boule, Minor (1950). On – and off – the floors. Sequence 12: 3–5. Burton, Alan, O’Sullivan, Tim, and Wells, Paul (1997). Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Cameron, Ian (1960). Editorial: Films. Oxford Opinion 38: 36. Cameron, Ian. (1962). ‘Films, directors and critics’. Movie 2, 4–7. Available at: www2. warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/films_directors_and_critics.pdf (accessed 14 October 2018). Cameron, Ian (ed.) (1972). The Movie Reader. London: November Books. Cameron, Ian, Mayersberg, Paul, Perkins, V.F., and Shivas, Mark (1963). Movie differences. Movie 8: 28–34. Cameron, Ian, Shivas, Mark, and Perkins, V.F. (1961). Joseph Losey on The Criminal. Oxford Opinion 45: 27–30. Caughie, John (ed.) (1981). Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Chibnall, Steve (2000). J. Lee Thompson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chibnall, Steve and McFarlane, Brian (2009). The British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Christie, Ian (ed.) (1978). Powell, Pressburger and Others. London: British Film Institute. Christie, Ian (1985). Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Waterstone. Dickinson, Thorold (1950). The filmwright and the audience. Sight & Sound 19 (1): 20–25. Durgnat, Raymond (1970). A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. London: Faber & Faber. Ericsson, Peter (1949). The Queen of Spades. Sequence 8: 82–84. Gibbs, John (2001). Sequence and the archaeology of British film criticism. Journal of Popular British Cinema 4: 14–29. Gibbs, John (2002). Mise‐en‐scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower Press. Gibbs, John (2006). Filmmakers’ choices. Close‐up 1: 1–87. Gibbs, John (2013). The Life of Mise‐en‐Scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Green, O.O. (1965). Michael Powell. Movie 14: 17–20. Grigs, Derick (1950). The Third Man. Sequence 10: 176–177. Halligan, Benjamin (2003). Michael Reeves. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harcourt‐Smith, Simon (1950). Stage Fright. Sight & Sound 19 (5): 207–208. Harper, Sue and Porter, Vincent (2001). Beyond media history: the challenge of visual style. Journal of British Cinema and Television 2 (1): 1–17. Hedling, Erik (1998). Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film‐maker. London: Cassell. Hedling, Erik (2003). Lindsay Anderson: Sequence and the rise of auteurism in 1950s Britain. In: British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (ed. Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard), 23–31. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hill, John (2010). Revisiting British film studies. Journal of British Cinema and Television 7 (2): 299–310. Hutchings, Peter (2000). Authorship and British cinema: the case of Roy Ward Baker. In: British Cinema, Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson), 179–189. London: Routledge.

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Hutchings, Peter (2001). The histogram and the list: the director in British film criticism. Journal of Popular British Cinema 4: 30–39. Izod, John, Magee, Karl, Hannan, Kathryn, and Gourdin‐Sangouard, Isabelle (2012). Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kapsis, Robert (1992). Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koch, Howard (1950). A playwright looks at the “filmwright”. Sight & Sound 19 (5): 210–214. Lambert, Gavin (1947). British films, 1947: survey and prospect. Sequence 2: 9–14. Lambert, Gavin (1949). French cinema – writers and directors. Sequence 9: 98–104. Lambert, Gavin (2000). Mainly About Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir. London: Faber and Faber. Lovell, Alan. (1969). ‘The British Cinema: The Unknown Cinema.’ BFI Education Department Seminar Paper. London: British Film Institute. Marlow, Alberta (1948). Oliver Twist. Sequence 5: 37–38. McFarlane, Brian (1999). Lance Comfort. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Medhurst, Andy (1991). That special thrill: Brief Encounter, homosexuality and authorship. Screen 32 (2): 197–208. Moor, Andrew (2012). Powell & Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces. London: I.B. Tauris. Perkins, V.F. (1962a). The British cinema. Movie 1: 2–8. Perkins, V.F. (1962b). Clive Donner & Some People. Movie 3: 22–25. Perkins, V.F. (1972). Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Powell, Dilys (1989). The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films. London: Pavilion. Rayns, Tony (2014). Adventures in the screen trade: the essential Raymond Durgnat. Sight & Sound 24 (12): 104–105. Roggen, Sam (2013). No quarterly can be too personal: how Sequence provided a pragmatic alternative to the politique des auteurs. Journal of British Cinema and Television 10 (2): 340–357. Sellors, C Paul (2010). Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths. New York: Wallflower Press. Spicer, Andrew (2006). Sydney Box. New York: Manchester University Press. Spicer, Andrew (2007). The author as author: restoring the screenwriter to British history. In: The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper), 89–103. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spicer, Andrew and McKenna, AT (2013). The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960–1980. London: I.B. Tauris. Truffaut, François (1976). A certain tendency of the French cinema. In: Movies and Methods (ed. Bill Nichols), 224–237. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wollen, Peter (1998). Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Expanded edn. London: BFI Publishing. Wood, Robin. (1969–70). ‘In memoriam Michael Reeves’. Movie 17, 2–6. Available at: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/in_memorium_michael_ reeves.pdf (accessed 14 October 2018). Wood, Robin (1989). Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press. Wood, Robin (2006). Personal Views: Explorations in Film, 2e. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

11

Acting and Stardom Jim Leach

Introduction Attitudes to acting and stardom in British cinema are central to My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis 2011), which depicts the clash of personalities and acting styles that occurred when the legendary British actor Laurence Olivier decided to cast the legendary American star Marilyn Monroe, whose acting ability was – at least in Olivier’s eyes – questionable, in The Prince and the Showgirl (1955). My Week with Marilyn draws on discourses of acting and national identity that constructed a difference between Britain and the United States in the 1950s and that continue to resonate in the twenty‐first century. Olivier had starred in many films (some  in  Hollywood), but, like most of the other cast members in his film, had learnt his craft on stage. Monroe, on the contrary, was the archetypal Hollywood star, and, by this point in her career, she was anxious to show that she could become a ‘real’ actress under the influence of Lee Strasberg’s Method, an American approach to acting that Olivier despised and that aimed at an ‘authentic’ performance in which the actor expressed the inner life of a character rather than imitate external behaviour. In representing these conflicts between theatre and film, and between Britain and the US, the film also asks the audience to compare their memories of the well‐known actors from the past with the performances of the modern actors who ­impersonate them. Watching Kenneth Branagh as Olivier, audiences would be reminded of the discourses that have linked them throughout the younger actor’s career, while the American actress Michelle Williams, known mainly for her roles in American Indie films, faced the challenge of embodying a star whose image is ingrained in the collective memory and remains highly visible in the media 50 years after her death. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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In his increasing frustration with his co‐star’s erratic behaviour, Olivier insists, ‘Stanislavski and the Method have no place on the film set’, and when Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), Monroe’s acting ‘coach’ tells him that Marilyn needs to find the ‘truth’ of her character, he tells her to ‘fake it’. This advice would seem appropriate given that the film in question was adapted from Terence Rattigan’s stage farce, set at the time of the coronation of George V, in which an American showgirl becomes involved with a Prince from a fictional European country. However, Vivien Leigh ( Julia Ormand), Olivier’s wife, who had played the role on stage, explains that her husband thought she was too old for the film version and cast Monroe because he is intent on the ‘truth’, an explanation that does not sit well with his dismissal of the Method. Olivier himself confesses that he thought working with Marilyn would make him ‘feel young again’, but he is distressed to find that he looks ‘dead in the rushes’, while she lights up the screen despite the difficulties she has created on the set. The film opens with a 1950s newsreel item on Monroe’s arrival in Britain in which the commentator refers to both the American star and Olivier as ‘royalty’, translating the glamour of stardom into the terms of the British class system, as did the introduction of the annual Royal Command Film Performance in 1946. Acting is also related to issues of class in British culture through Marilyn’s friendship with the upper‐class Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who is trying to escape his family background by getting a menial job on the film set, and who takes Marilyn to visit Windsor Castle, where she is applauded by the staff and adopts her star persona, after asking him, ‘Shall I be her?’ She then strikes characteristic sexy poses, and the idea that ‘Marilyn Monroe’ is a construction gains added resonance from the awareness that Michelle Williams is impersonating Marilyn being Marilyn. In his ‘week with Marilyn’, the film suggests, Colin gets to see the real woman behind the troubled figure whose ‘unprofessional’ behaviour has turned Olivier against her and discovers that her greatest acting achievement is the creation of her star persona.

Acting and Stardom in Context As My Week with Marilyn demonstrates, it is very difficult to pin down the ­implications and effects of an actor’s performance. Indeed, if there is one thing that most writers on film acting agree upon, it is the difficulty of finding ways to discuss it without resorting to subjective value judgements. Thus Peter Krämer and Alan Lovell refer to acting as ‘an elusive art’ (1999, p. 5), while John O. Thompson admits, ‘performances seem ineffable, and thinking about them induces reverie rather than analysis’ (1978, p. 55). The root of the problem, as Robin Wood has suggested, is that ‘a film actor exists within a context and is not really separable from it’ (1976, p. 20). How we respond to an actor’s performance in a given film



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depends on the way it is shaped by such elements of film style as mise‐en‐scène, lighting, editing, camera positioning, music, and costume. Films themselves also exist within contexts, and we need to take into account ‘the different ways in which a particular acting style fits a particular genre’ (Geraghty 2002, p. 56), as well as the relations between the screen performance and the prevailing social norms in the offscreen world in which the film was made. It is even more challenging to write about acting in the context of a national cinema without reproducing the myths and stereotypes that have historically shaped discourses of national identity. In the case of British cinema, much has been made of the restraint that is allegedly a key component of the national character, as compared to, for example, excitable Italians, the sexually sophisticated French, and action‐oriented Americans. Christine Gledhill, for example, refers to ‘the supposed ingrained dominant of national character: reserve, translated in acting terms as “restraint” and “underplaying”’ (2007.p. 203). Acting is thus linked to myths of British identity that stress the values of tolerance and fair‐mindedness but is also associated with canonical thinking about British cinema, and thus with the ‘realist’ films privileged by this critical approach, leading to the impression that genres of excess such as melodrama and horror – and the kind of acting that these genres encourage – are somehow unBritish. This reputation for understatement sits rather uncomfortably with the ­frequently remarked association between British film acting and theatricality. Since the major British film studios have always been located mainly around London, film actors could easily be recruited from the West End theatres, and indeed most British film actors started out on stage, and many continued their theatrical careers after achieving recognition for their film work. As a result, it is often suggested that acting in British films is less ‘cinematic’ than in Hollywood movies, and this ­perceived theatrically is also inextricably linked to the British class system. During the 1930 and 1940s, for example, students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where many film actors studied, were taught to ‘talk posh, but with unaffected accent’ (Hodgson 2013, p. 24), the point being to speak what was regarded as ‘proper’ English (or Oxford English or BBC English or the King’s English) but without the clipped diction associated with the aristocracy. The result, however, often sounded upper class to popular audiences and, in the case of male actors, ‘effeminate’ in comparison to rugged American heroes (Lowe 2004, p. 184). Regional or working‐class accents were usually confined to minor roles or to comedians recruited from the other main contribution of the stage to British cinema: music hall and variety shows. Theatricality functioned as a code word for emotional excess (or melodrama) but also for upper‐class manners and a lack of virility. As we shall see, the rehabilitation of regional accents in the 1960s complicated the politics of class, but accents have also been an issue in relation to the casting of foreign actors – usually American or European – in British films. This practice has a long history, often as an attempt to attract international audiences, but the effect

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was usually to help define, by contrast, the national identity of the characters embodied by British actors. The colony of British actors established in Hollywood in the 1930s to provide character actors for films set in Britain or its Empire also reinforced a stereotypical sense of Britishness in contrast to the dashing American stars. More unsettling effects sometimes occurred when British actors played foreign characters in British films, and the challenge to myths of national identity has become stronger and more complex with the crossover of actors into different national cinemas in the context of the contemporary global media culture. One solution to the problem of writing about acting has been to focus on the star system, since stars’ personae, shaped not just by their films but by their visibility in extra‐filmic discourses (media coverage, publicity, fan clubs, and so on), can more easily be analysed in relation to the film industries that construct and exploit them, the genres in which they appear, and the historical moments at which they achieve success. There has then been a tendency to associate stardom with Hollywood and acting with British cinema, and critical discourses often affirm ‘the ability to act’ (Geraghty 2005, p. 59) as a sign of the greater authenticity of British films in the realist tradition. However, a domestic star system did exist, built up around actors, such as Jessie Matthews and George Formby in the 1930s, whose appeal was appreciated mainly by national audiences. Some British actors, such as Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant, did become Hollywood stars and thus integrated into American culture, while others achieved star status in Hollywood while also remaining active in Britain. Vivien Leigh, for example, starred in several Hollywood films, most notably Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), in which she achieved great success as a flirtatious Southern belle during the American Civil War, who is torn between her feelings for two men, one a respectable plantation owner, played by British actor Leslie Howard, and the other a less reputable but more virile adventurer, played by American star Clark Gable. Predictably, Gable’s forceful performance attracted much more attention than Howard’s more nuanced acting. However, the distinction between star and actor is highly unstable: actors can shift from one category to the other at different points in their careers, and some, like Olivier, become hybrids that can be treated as one or the other in different contexts. In general, it can be said that stars stand out from context: stardom creates an established persona that resists the influence of the context but can, as in the case of Monroe, become a context within which the actor feels deprived of agency, as often happened during the Studio era when actors signed long‐term contracts that left them little control over the films in which they appeared. In this chapter, in order to approach these issues more concretely, I will offer three brief case‐studies of British actors, exploring the relations between the actor/ star and developments in the national cinema in different historical periods. I will examine the conditions and discourses that shaped attitudes to acting and stardom in the careers of Phyllis Calvert, Laurence Harvey, and Daniel Day‐Lewis. I have chosen these actors not because they represent the best of British film acting but



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because their careers enable me to address some important issues involved in the relations between the discourses of acting/stardom and national cinema. They have also received little critical attention in the growing body of work on British film actors. In each case, I will focus on one of their films to place the actor in the context of the other elements of film language that shape and frame their performances.

Phyllis Calvert: Melodramatic Acting The critical resistance to the popular costume melodramas produced by Gainsborough studios in the 1940s exposed the class differences at work in the debate on realism. Brief Encounter (1945), written by Noël Coward, directed by David Lean, and starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, was immediately accepted into the canon of ‘quality’ films and became ‘the most critically lauded film of the forties and probably of British cinema generally’ (Murphy 1989, p. 109). Yet, as Robert Murphy and others have pointed out, its depiction of a married woman struggling with her conscience over her attraction to another man, losing herself in fantasies accompanied by the romantic music of Rachmaninov, and driven to the verge of suicide, hardly ‘fits into an aesthetic of realism’ (Murphy 1989, p. 111), nor does its (apparently) pre‐war setting with no reference to the political upheavals of the time. The main difference from the popular and much‐maligned melodramas made at Gainsborough at the same time is in the way ­emotion is generated in Johnson’s performance, which accords with Richard Dyer’s observation that ‘some of the great emotional moments in British cinema occur when the performance allows the pressure of feeling to be felt beneath a flatness of expression’ (1994, pp. 17–18). This kind of emotional effect was acceptable to critics as a representation of the stiff‐upper‐lip response to adversity that was seen as a quality of the British character, but it alienated the popular, mainly female, audiences who responded to the more open emotional outpourings of the melodramas and made stars out of their lead actors. According to Murphy, ‘British critics had a peculiar blindness towards the talents of British actresses’, enthusing over ‘stage actresses like Celia Johnson when they made occasional appearances in films but … sneeringly dismissive of women who made their career in British films’ (1989, pp. 105–106). Among these women were Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert, who, along with Stewart Granger and James Mason, became the main Gainsborough stars after they appeared together in the first of the studio’s costume melodramas, The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943) (Figure 11.1). They all had theatrical backgrounds, and, although it was their film work that made them stars, they tended to share the critics’ view of the films in which they appeared. Like their Hollywood counterparts, they were under contract to the studio, and the men in particular were uncomfortable with the roles

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Figure 11.1  Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert in The Man in Grey (1943).

they were asked to play in films drawn mainly from the despised genre of romance novels written by and for women. Even Lockwood and Calvert tried to get out of parts they thought were especially demeaning, and Calvert later insisted that, while she enjoyed working at Gainsborough, she ‘hated’ the films (quoted in Aspinall and Murphy 1983, p. 60). What the actors, like the critics, objected to most was the apparently simple moral oppositions that structured the films’ narratives, but the actors were also aware that the elaborate costumes, ornate settings, and emotive music often overshadowed their performances. These elements, rather than the psychological c­ omplexity of the characters or the linguistic quality of the dialogue, conveyed the emotional impact, and the actors were required to function as elements within the expressionistic mise‐ en‐scène. At the end of the war and amid the austerity of the post‐war years, the films spoke to the desires and anxieties of their audiences, and, while this allowed them to identify with the characters (and the actors who played them), it left the stars feeling unfulfilled as actors. Unlike Lockwood, Calvert has received very little critical attention, perhaps because Lockwood often played assertive women who used their sexuality to get ahead – as she did most memorably in The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945) – while Calvert’s star persona was based on ‘a “wholesome” image of 1940s wife and mother’ (McFarlane 2010, p. 63), most overtly presented in They Were Sisters



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(Arthur Crabtree, 1945), in which she plays the most stable and happily married of the three sisters. Although she did pose for pin‐up photos, her publicity emphasised her family life, as in a 1945 Pathé newsreel showing the star at home with her husband and child (http://www.britishpathe.com/video/phyllis‐calvert). However, there were hints of tension behind this image, which led to what she called ‘a sort of split personality’ that meant ‘whenever I’ve been in the studios, I’ve felt that I should be with my family, and when I’m with my family I think … I ought to be thinking of my career’ (quoted in Aspinall and Murphy 1983, p. 60). On a few occasions, her film roles did suggest other possibilities in her persona, as in The Root of All Evil (Brock Williams, 1947), in which her depiction of a ruthless ­businesswoman evokes Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), and especially in Madonna of the Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree, 1945). Madonna of the Seven Moons ‘avoids realism in every way’ (Harper 1995, p. 50). Although the opening title insists that its depiction of a ‘dual personality’ is ‘taken from life’ and has been verified by medical authorities, this functions mainly as a taunt directed at realist critics, introducing a film (apparently) set in pre‐war Italy, but with no reference to the political events of the time, with English actors playing the Italian characters, and with a convoluted plot about a woman (Calvert) who, as Maddalena, is a respectable wife and mother but, as Rosanna, is a gypsy and the lover of a bandit called Nino (Granger). She has no conscious awareness of the ­different sides of her nature, but her condition is traced back to the opening sequence in which she is raped as a schoolgirl (with Calvert in pigtails). The rape is, of course, not depicted on screen, but its elision in the film parallels her own repression of the traumatic event and is the first of the many gaps in the narrative and lapses of memory by the characters (Leach 2004, p. 70). The film revels in its affronts to realism, which are compounded in the casting of Patricia Roc, an actress only slightly younger than Calvert, as Maddalena’s daughter Angela, whose return from school in England, dressed in shorts and with a male companion, apparently shocks her mother so much that she disappears and becomes Rosanna for a second time (and only now do we hear of the first time). Her affair with Nino is depicted in ‘uninhibited love scenes, which are unusually explicit for the period’ (Harper 1995, p. 49), and which would have shocked even Angela, whose male companion assures her parents that nothing improper took place on their journey together. Maddalena, in effect, internalises the moral oppositions acted out in the other Gainsborough melodramas, and her transformation into Rosanna allows Calvert to break temporarily with her star persona, acting out what Laura suppresses in Brief Encounter. The transition takes place at Angela’s birthday party, at which Maddalena appears wearing a new close‐fitting evening gown bought from a fashion house to which her daughter has taken her. There have been hints earlier that she suffers from ‘nerves’, and Angela has wondered why her mother did not write to her for a year, but her father suppresses any discussion of the past. She is disturbed when Angela gives her a jewel, which a servant says is like ‘peasant women’ wear,

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and a close‐up of Calvert reacting in horror, accompanied by eerie music featuring a theremin, prompts the servant to say she looks like ‘a different person’. At the party, in the new gown, Maddalena appears rather embarrassed and afraid that people will ‘stare’ at her. A guest suggests ‘she has stepped out of one century into another’, and Angela’s ‘modern’ influence seems to be arousing her sexuality, which will be unleashed when she returns to Nino. The crisis comes when she asks the name of a guest, a gigolo who has come with one of Angela’s friends, and hears that he is Sandro Barucci, Nino’s brother. She falls to the floor, and the sequence ends with a fade. Lying in her bed, after the doctor has cleared the room to ‘let her sleep’, the camera looks down on her in close‐up and then pans away to a clock. After a dissolve to indicate the passage of time, the camera pans back to her face, and the soundtrack carries disembodied voices speaking lines heard earlier in the film. Then a male voice is heard (identifiable as Granger’s, who has been briefly glimpsed earlier), and the theremin music starts again. Maddalena gets up and saunters to her dressing table with a flowing motion quite different from her earlier restrained movements. She is reflected in a mirror as she changes into a gypsy costume, and carnival‐style music starts up as she descends the shadowy stairs and runs out into the night. Although the emergence of the uninhibited side of Maddalena’s nature leads to her death, Calvert’s full‐blooded melodramatic acting, against her established persona, supported by costume, sets, and music, brings out the tensions around ­sexuality and gender that were built into the Gainsborough formula. Similar ­tensions are at work in the films made at around the same time by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and would erupt again in the Hammer horror films at the end of the 1950s, suggesting that the ‘excessive strategies’ (Gledhill 1987, p. 30) of melodrama, and the acting styles they entail, are not as foreign to the national cinema as the proponents of the realist canon would have us believe.

Laurence Harvey: Realism and the British New Wave Phyllis Calvert was a star for only a few years in the 1940s, although she continued to work in film (with a brief stint in Hollywood), theatre and the emergent medium of television. Of the stars created by the Gainsborough films, only James Mason went on to greater success (in Britain and Hollywood). Melodrama certainly did not disappear from British cinema, but critics continued to champion ‘realist’ films that supposedly blended the modes of documentary and fiction. Since the wartime and postwar films in this vein tended to stress the need for individuals to operate within a community, there was a resistance to the concept of stardom, but, at the end of the 1950s, a cycle of films often referred to as the British New Wave, offered a more intense form of realism, with an emphasis on location shooting and working‐class characters. These



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films had a more complex relation to stardom: While most of them were celebrated for introducing young actors, such as Albert Finney and Alan Bates, with authentic working‐class accents, the rebellious characters they portray are trying to assert themselves as individuals, and these actors were ­promoted as rising stars. Many reviewers of Room at the Top ( Jack Clayton, 1958) agreed with Alexander Walker’s verdict that ‘no finer work has come out of our studios since … Brief Encounter’ (quoted in Sinyard 2000, p. 41). Later, it was acknowledged as the first film in the new movement, but it is in many ways a transitional film, made by a mainstream studio (Romulus Films) and relying on well‐known actors and stars. Although much of the film was shot on location in Bradford (renamed Warley), the references to the Second World War suggest the action is set in the late 1940s (as is John Braine’s novel from which the film was adapted), and there is a constant tension between the narrative past and the visual presence of the city. The social realism is also complicated by the subjective investment in the ­experience of Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), the working‐class Yorkshireman who is present in virtually every sequence and whose sexual desire and driving ambition shape the narrative. Harvey’s background and established star status did not make him the most obvious choice to play Joe. He was born in Lithuania, to a Jewish family that moved to South Africa when he was a child, and, although he anglicised his name when he came to England to study drama, he exaggerated his foreign origins to enhance his star image. His affairs and extravagant lifestyle kept him in the headlines in the 1950s, and he very much encouraged such attention. When, early in his career, an interviewer asked him why he became an actor, he replied, ‘I wanted a profession where I could start at the top’ (quoted in Sinai 2003, p. 112), and he gained a reputation as an unscrupulous self‐promoter. As a result, his star persona became ­associated with fraud and inauthenticity, especially damaging in a film culture that was invested in realism. Ironically, however, it was this persona that gave him ‘another kind of authenticity’ well suited to the role of a man ruthlessly reaching for the top (Sinyard 2000, p. 40). Although the studio system was breaking down in the 1950s, Harvey was under contract to Romulus, as was Heather Sears, who also appears in the film as Susan Brown, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, whom Joe marries at the end of the film. However, the producers’ first choice to play Joe was Stewart Granger, with his wife Jean Simmons, as Alice Aisgill, the older woman with whom Joe has an affair (Sinai 2003, p. 232). Vivien Leigh was also considered for Alice, and former Gainsborough star Jean Kent really wanted to play the role (McFarlane 1992, p. 150; Sinyard 2000, p. 39). The eventual decision to cast French actress Simone Signoret, even though Alice is a local woman in the novel, owed much to the ­prevailing assumption that continental actresses were more sexually sophisticated than their British counterparts. The decision paid off when Signoret won an Oscar for her performance, but her star persona as a woman who is ‘ineluctably the subject of her own desire, not the object’ (Hayward 2009, p. 121) ensures

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that her affair with Joe challenges conventional attitudes towards women (with which Joe is identified at the beginning of the film). Although Harvey’s performance won praise at the time, some critics found his accent unconvincing. Since the 1960s, the ability of many British actors to use accents not their own has been seen as a professional accomplishment, and this skill is very much in evidence in contemporary transnational filmmaking. Harvey’s perceived deficiencies in this regard were not apparent to most viewers at the time, and were probably due more to a general sense of the actor’s ‘inauthenticity’. In fact, all the accents in the film are suspect, with the exception of Alice’s French accent, either in the sense that the actors do not come from the north or that the characters adopt accents to reinforce their social roles. While, as a foreigner, Alice stands ‘outside the complications of class’ (Hill 1986, p. 158), Susan has what one character calls a ‘finishing school’ accent, and her parents’ social and economic status is signified by their diametrically opposed accents: her mother’s affected upper‐class drawl, and her father’s exaggerated working‐class accent clearly designed to show that he is a self‐made man. Accents are thus performed and become part of the artificial social world that exists within the realistic conventions of the film. While Harvey had a theatrical background (as did Finney and Bates) and continued his stage career after he became a film star, he was always under pressure to choose between acting and stardom. When they were filming The Alamo ( John Wayne, 1960), Wayne reportedly told him that, ‘if he wanted to stay a star he … should cut out the acting junk’ (Hickey and Smith 1975, p. 132). Harvey’s British critics would have given him the opposite advice, but, in Room at the Top, the element of theatricality in his performance – seen as a lack of authenticity – is matched by that of the society Joe wants to break into. The film makes the theatrical metaphor explicit when Joe joins the local amateur dramatic society after seeing Susan and Alice performing in a play. The effect is to highlight the social performances outside the theatre, and Joe sees the theatre, as Harvey himself put it, as a ‘loophole’ to break through class barriers, because it has ‘no class consciousness’ (quoted in Martin 1960, p. 75). Even here, however, Joe is ridiculed at a rehearsal for mispronouncing a word, leading to his impassioned declaration that he is proud to be working class. Yet he has joined only to meet Susan, in order to escape from what his aunt and uncle call his place in the world. When he attracts Alice’s attention in the green room, their affair offers him the chance to break with social conventions, and, when they take a brief trip to a rain‐ swept seaside resort, they recite together Polonius’s advice to his son from Hamlet, emphasising the phrase ‘to thine own self be true’ (the fact that this is a line from a play taken out of context ironically underlines the problems involved in the ­concept of ‘authenticity’). Harvey as Joe thus has to develop his role in the context of the opposition ­between Alice’s mature sexuality and the social hierarchy of the industrial city. As would be the case in the later British New Wave films, his performance is also



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placed in the context of a strong visual emphasis on the urban environment, and this is associated with the Brown family from the beginning when the newly arrived Joe looks out over a cityscape dominated by a factory chimney bearing the letters BROWN (Figure 11.2). In the film’s plot, Joe succeeds in reaching the top by seducing Susan and then marrying her when she becomes pregnant; but he is forced to break up with Alice, who gets drunk and dies in a car crash. At the end, Harvey has to register Joe’s sense of loss at the moment he achieves his goals: first, when he learns of Alice’s death from his fellow office workers who discuss it in gory detail while congratulating him on his forthcoming marriage; then, at the wedding itself, when he hesitates before saying, ‘I do’, and sits stony‐faced in the limousine as he drives away with Susan, who detects a tear on his face and ­attributes it to his emotion at their ‘beautiful’ wedding. After his success in Room at the Top, for which he received an Oscar nomination, Harvey was able to break into Hollywood, and while he continued to appear in British films, he was for a while ‘the busiest actor in Hollywood’ (Sinai 2003, pp. 360–361). His performance as Joe Lampton consolidated a star persona that was already beginning to emerge in his earlier films and that would be reinforced by his depiction of ruthless and self‐centred characters in such Hollywood films as Butterfield 8 (Daniel Mann, 1960) and The Manchurian Candidate ( John Frankenheimer, 1962). However, the qualities that enabled him to become a Hollywood star only encouraged British critics to continue to ­disparage his credentials as a stage and film actor.

Figure 11.2  Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1958).

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Daniel Day‐Lewis: ‘Cross‐over’ Acting One thing that Madonna of the Seven Moons and Room at the Top have in common, despite their many differences, is that all the actors in both films are white. When critics debated the realistic credentials of the latter, the absence of visible minorities was not an issue that was seen to compromise its realism, but there had been a major change in the population of Britain, with an influx of immigrants from the former British colonies in the decade between the immediate postwar years (when the film was set) and the time of its production (when Bradford had become a city with a large and growing Pakistani diasporic community). The new multicultural Britain presented a challenge to traditional ideas of national identity, which meant, among other things, that the make‐up of the cinema audience was changing at a time when box‐office figures were in steep decline because of competition from television. The establishment of Channel 4 television in 1982, with a remit to provide ­alternatives to the offerings of the existing networks, changed the relationship between film and television in Britain. It began to invest in films that received a limited theatrical release before being shown on television. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, took advantage of this initiative to explore the new multicultural make‐up of British society. The film was an international success, but it also excited controversies about its depiction of British Asians and the state of British society under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is drawn into the business enterprises of his uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), a staunch supporter of Thatcher, and starts a sexual relationship with Johnny (Daniel Day‐Lewis), a former member of the racist National Front. As several critics noted, it is very much a ‘cross‐over’ film, both in terms of its dual allegiance to film and television aesthetics and in its treatment of ethnic and sexual issues not usually found in mainstream films. In order to stress its importance, one reviewer insisted, ‘For what the film says about the way we live now I consider it to be as important a landmark as Room at the Top was 25 years ago’ (Tom Hutchinson, quoted in Geraghty 2005, p. 13). Most discussions of Day‐Lewis as an actor begin with references to his privileged family background as the son of Cecil Day‐Lewis, Poet Laureate from 1968 to 1972, and Jill Balcon, the actress and daughter of film producer Michael Balcon. His father’s Anglo‐Irish background enabled him to become a ‘cross‐over’ actor in another sense, drawing on both national traditions. Although he was hailed as ‘an actor of the new, unstagey breed’ (Mayne 1989, p. 240), he had studied drama and was best known at the time of My Beautiful Laundrette for his stage and television performances, although he had appeared in several films. His rise to international stardom was precipitated when My Beautiful Laundrette premiered in New York in the same week as James Ivory’s A Room with a View, in which he played an extremely different character, ‘an effete Edwardian dandy’ (Hedden 2008, p. 12). His subsequent career built on this momentum, and the word ‘chameleon’ was



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frequently use to describe his ability to play roles ranging from an Irish cerebral palsy victim in My Left Foot ( Jim Sheridan, 1989) to an American president in Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012), winning Academy Awards for both performances, as well as for There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). His star persona has earned comparisons with Olivier, who also could seem almost unrecognisable from film to film, but it also depends on stories about his intense commitment to Method acting and the lengths to which he will go to get inside the skin of the characters he plays. As a result, his acting sometimes encourages a divided response in which, as we empathise with the characters he plays, we admire the virtuoso skills of the actor. In My Beautiful Laundrette, his performance as Johnny is developed mainly in relation to actors of Indian background (Figure 11.3). The younger characters such as Omar and Tania (Rita Wolf ) were played by British Asian actors who were relatively unknown and inexperienced because of the lack of opportunities in British film and television at the time. By contrast, Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffrey, as Omar’s father and uncle, were familiar figures from heritage film and television productions dealing with colonial India. Both had appeared in Richard Attenborough’s epic biopic Gandhi (1982) (in which Day‐Lewis also played a small role as a racist South African youth). The critical response to Day‐Lewis as Johnny also owed much to the film’s tone, which gradually undercuts its apparent social realism, through such techniques as its fragmented narrative structure and expressionist lighting, to convey ‘the

Figure 11.3  Daniel Day‐Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).

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feelings, contradictions and imagination of the characters’ (Henriques 1989, p. 19). Central to this fantastic dimension is the launderette, which Omar takes over for his uncle and which he, with Johnny’s help, refurbishes and turns into a site of performance in which hybrid identities can be acted out. Being ‘in‐between’, in terms of both ethnic and sexual identity, becomes a sign not of weakness (as Omar’s sister‐in‐law insists) but of possibility (Hill 1999). Within this space of hybridity, Johnny is caught between the demands of his former gang, who accuse him of no longer being ‘for England’, and his feelings for Omar. His attempts to balance these pressures make him what Frears called the film’s ‘moral center’ (quoted in Friedman and Stewart 1994, p. 228), and Day‐Lewis, who is nominally a supporting actor in a film with a large and varied cast, turns this into a star performance that complicates an already complex text. He adopts a working‐class south London accent that aligns him with the gang, but his lithe and glamorous physical appearance distinguishes him from them. At the same time, his casual clothing gives him a freedom of movement compared with the suits that Omar wears after he becomes a businessman (a contrast emphasised in the film’s publicity). Ironically, a film that has been (justly) praised for its celebration of ­multicultural possibilities turned its main white actor into an international star.

Conclusion: Acting in (Inter)national Contexts Like Day‐Lewis, Stephen Frears was best known in 1985 for his television work. Although made for television, My Beautiful Laundrette launched his career as a film director, mainly in Britain, but with a few Hollywood productions. His prolific output included a follow‐up collaboration with Kureishi, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), which failed to achieve the same impact, partly, perhaps, because it lacked a charismatic new star like Day‐Lewis. His first large‐budget production was Dangerous Liaisons (1989), based on a play by Christopher Hampton, itself adapted from a classic French novel. He thought of casting Day‐Lewis as Valmont, the p­ hilandering aristocrat at the centre of the plot but eventually went with Hampton’s suggestion of the American actor John Malkovich. He justified the choice by stating, ‘I wanted to make a film that was about emotion rather than manners’, and the main female roles also went to American stars (Glenn  Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Uma Thurman). Although he acknowledged that there was an economic motive because ‘casting American actors makes it more accessible to larger audiences’, he insisted that it was mainly because ‘if you cast a lot of British actors it would be perceived as being a ­fashionable play’, and ‘it would be more outrageous with a cast of American actors’ (quoted in Friedman and Stewart 1994, p. 232). The phrasing of Frears’s justification is interesting in that it is based more on perceptions about national acting traditions than on the actuality of acting in



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British cinema, which encompasses a wide range of types and styles. In the film itself, the ‘emotional’ performances of American actors as upper‐class French characters are placed in tension with the social artifice, the stately music, the ornate settings, and the theatrical performances that frame the action. While the resultant ironies work well in this context, the alleged opposition between mannered British actors and emotional American stars is very limiting. After all, American Method actors such as Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro have very distinct mannerisms, and, in their very different ways, British actors such as Phyllis Calvert, Laurence Harvey, and Daniel Day‐Lewis often give strong emotional performances. At the same time, the tension between manners and emotions that was central to films like Brief Encounter is still apparent, in a more international ­context, as in The Remains of the Day ( James Ivory, 1993), a British film with understated performances by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, based on a novel by a Japanese‐born author and with a screenplay by a German‐born writer. And a ­similar tension is found in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993), a Hollywood film starring Day‐Lewis, as well as Wynona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer. The context of specific films is vital in responding to these performances, but ingrained myths of national identity, such as the ones to which Frears appeals, often provide an even more powerful context that reduces complexity and contradiction to a monolithic uniformity. The British people have always been a diverse group, incorporating class, regional, ethnic, and other differences, and that diversity became even more complex in the course of the twentieth century. Actors from some of these groups have only recently begun to receive significant roles in mainstream films, and few have yet made it into the rank of British stars. Nevertheless, even on the limited evidence of my three case‐studies, it is apparent that the national cinema has supported a wide range of acting styles and star p­ ersonas in the context of different genres and in response to changing social and cultural pressures.

References Aspinall, Sue and Murphy, Robert (eds.) (1983). Gainsborough Melodrama. London: British Film Institute. Dyer, Richard (1994). Feeling English. Sight and Sound 4 (3): 16–19. Friedman, Lester and Stewart, S (1994). Keeping his own voice: an interview with Stephen Frears. In: Re‐viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992 (ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon), 221–240. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Geraghty, Christine (2002). Crossing over: performing as a lady and a dame. Screen 43 (1): 41–56. Geraghty, Christine (2005). My Beautiful Laundrette. London: I.B. Tauris. Gledhill, Christine (1987). The melodramatic field: an investigation. In: Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (ed. Christine Gledhill), 5–39. London: British Film Institute.

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Gledhill, Christine (2007). The screen actress from silence to sound. In: The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (ed. Maggie B Gale and John Stokes), 193–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, Sue (1995). Madonna of the Seven Moons. History Today 45 (8): 47–52. Hayward, Susan (2009). Simone Signoret: costume drama and the star text – a case study: Casque d’or. In: Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema (ed. Tytti Soila), 121–131. New Barnet: John Libbey. Hedden, Andrew (2008). The outsider: themes from the work of Daniel Day‐Lewis. Cineaste 38 (2): 8–13. Henriques, Julian (1989). Realism and the new language. In: Black Film, British Cinema (ed. Kobena Mercer), 18–20. London: ICA. Hickey, Des and Smith, Gus (1975). The Prince: The Public and Private Life of Laurence Harvey. London: Leslie Frewin. Hill, John (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: British Film Institute. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hodgson, Michael (2013). Patricia Roc: The Goddess of the Odeons. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. Krämer, Peter and Lovell, Alan (1999). Introduction. In: Screen Acting (ed. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer), 1–9. London: Routledge. Leach, Jim (2004). British Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Vicky (2004). “The best speaking voices in the world”: Robert Donat, stardom and the voice in British cinema. Journal of British Cinema and Television 1 (2): 181–196. Martin, P. (1960). ‘I call on Laurence Harvey’. Saturday Evening Post (11 June), pp. 33, 71, 75, 77–78. Mayne, Richard (1989). Daniel Day‐Lewis. Sight and Sound 58 (4): 240–241. McFarlane, Brian (1992). Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema. London: British Film Institute. McFarlane, Brian (2010). Ingénues, lovers, wives and mothers: the 1940s careers of Googie Withers and Phyllis Calvert. In: British Women’s Cinema (ed. Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams), 62–76. London: Routledge. Murphy, Robert (1989). Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–49. London: Routledge. Sinai, Anne (2003). Reach for the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Sinyard, Neil (2000). Jack Clayton. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, John O (1978). Screen acting and the commutation test. Screen 19 (2): 55–69. Wood, Robin (1976). Acting up. Film Comment 12 (2): 20–25.

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British and Irish Film Music K. J. Donnelly

Introduction The scrutiny of film music is a young pursuit in academia and until recently has possessed little unity. Unsurprisingly then, there has been little writing about music in British and Irish films. In the study of film, music has been analysed often in narratological terms, paying attention to its contributions to narrative development. While this has been dominant in the discipline of Film Studies, music‐centred ways of thinking about film music have tended to focus more on other characteristics, such as film music’s structuring aspects, textural effects, and emotional impact. The former bears the influence of dominant cognitive film theory and its formalist approach to narrative, while the latter broadly follows musicological traditions. There has been a small amount of research concerned with how film music might have a nationally specific dimension, either pertaining to a country’s film industry or musical traditions. Books such as Miguel Mera and David Burnand’s (2006) European Film Music, Tatiana Egorova’s (1997) Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey, Rebecca Coyle’s (1998) Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music, and Robynn Stilwell and Phil Powrie’s (2008) edited collection Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR: Cultural Politics and Propaganda, not only look to how a local situation might define film music but also investigate the role of music in signifying national characteristics and confirming a sense of community and locational specificity in films. This is particularly pertinent to film music in British and Irish films, where there is not only a strong sense of community but also strong musical traditions upon which to draw. Britain has had a strong classical music tradition, while Ireland has had a strong folk music tradition, and both have had and still have a strong tradition in popular music in a variety of guises. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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In both cases, the older traditional form which initially dominated British and Irish film music has been challenged  –  displaced or amended by forms derived from newer forms of popular culture, and pop music in particular. Doubtless this increasing tendency towards the exploitation of pop music in British and Irish films has been due to the continued and, indeed, remarkable success of pop music from these two countries over the past few decades. There have been some important perennial issues for music and film in Britain and Ireland, some of which relate to cinema or music more generally. Principal among these has been the notion of film and music as a component of ‘national culture’ or exemplar of ‘national’ characteristics. This originates in the conception of culture as an emanation from a unified community, and film and music have both served at various times to unite disparate communities. This sense of communal value has led, particularly in Britain, to a debate about cultural value tied to aesthetics. At various times, there has been an insistence that British films should embody ‘quality’ in comparison with overseas products. Discourses such as these have served both to elevate and to denigrate certain forms of British film, and the arguments have intersected with another set of arguments relating to financial value and, specifically, the issue of film as an export. As a result, notions of British cinema as essentially ‘an industry’ have at various times either co‐opted or pushed to the side aesthetic debates. Here, music’s success as an export has sometimes paved the way for industrial success for film. Perhaps the most medium‐specific issue that has coloured the way that film and music have been debated in Britain and Ireland is related to the craft of film music. This has involved questions of how far film music is a particular skill, how far it can showcase compositional ability and how far it can also prove to be a space for experimentation. This intersects with debates of cultural value and the film industry’s relationship with the overshadowing presence of Hollywood as an object to be negotiated. Music has often proved to be a tangible sign of ‘quality’ in a film, and both British and Irish cinema have employed music to raise the profile of films as well as imbue them with a sense of added worth.

British Film Music and the ‘Classical’ Tradition Although Britain had a strong classical music tradition in the early twentieth century, in the second part of that century it proved itself highly effective in terms of popular music. Indeed, Britain has been a world‐beater since the 1960s, consistently enjoying an unrepresentatively strong profile in the international pop‐music marketplace. Since the Beatles and the rise of British pop and rock, it has held its own and at times held a stranglehold on the international popular music market. In addition to this, in terms of orchestral film music, Britain still produces copious amounts of composers who are siphoned off to careers in Hollywood



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(recent examples include David Arnold, Edward Shearmur, Harry Gregson‐Williams, and Atticus Ross), while it is notable that two of the most significant moments in British film production’s international success have taken place at the same time as the massive international successes of British popular music. In the early 1960s, the ‘beat boom’ was followed by the ‘American Invasion’ led by the Beatles, and ­subsequently Hollywood invested in British cinema leading to a few years of ­imaginative films with extremely high production values. Similarly, the early 1980s saw Colin Welland’s celebrated Oscar speech for Chariots of Fire (1981) which proclaimed that the British were coming. He was not referring, however, to the ‘Second British Invasion’ of British bands such as Duran Duran and Culture Club storming the American charts on a scale not seen for nearly 20 years but British films. One could speculate that there has been an intimate connection between international success for British music and British film, where they whereby mutually ­publicise and encourage each other. In Britain, a sense of national culture in the twentieth century was often ­identified via middle‐class concerns about culture that manifested itself as an interest in ‘art’, although not in its ‘high art’ form. This was most evident in British cinema culture in the 1940s, when, as John Ellis noted, there was a prevailing notion of ‘quality’ understood to stand above standard mainstream product, as well as in the later anxiety about ‘low culture’ successes (1978, pp. 5–10). So, in later periods, for example, writers about British film were inclined to marginalise discussion of the extremely popular ‘Carry On …’ films or Hammer horror films. It certainly did not register that British horror films had some startling film scores, some by composers with distinct connections to art music (Huckvale 2008). For example, modernist Elizabeth Lutyens scored The Skull (1965) while James Bernard, the most identifiable Hammer composer, had been an assistant to Benjamin Britten, one of the most acclaimed British composers of the twentieth century. Other art music composers noted for their modernist tendencies who also wrote music for Hammer horror films included Humphrey Searle, Tristram Cary, John McCabe, and Malcolm Williamson.1 Dissonant and inaccessible modernist music, which was prominent in the art music of many countries, was never widely embraced in Britain and it is remarkable that British horror films became a repository for this type of music, with respected composers using its styles in film more than was the case in other countries. Such music was of little note to critics and historians, in terms of orchestral art music as well as film music, and there was an anxiety in Britain about modernism as an ‘import’ that did not engage with British traditions and which by implication should gain no purchase (Blom 1947, p. 193). British art music fostered a particular indigenous form of orchestral music, known as ‘English pastoral’. This is exemplified most clearly by the orchestral music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius, although Edward Elgar and other composers from the first part of the twentieth century are often seen to be a part of, or influential upon, this type of music. Perhaps crucially, this music tends to involve the reworking of an old British folk tune, as evident in Vaughan

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Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves or George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow. More recently, this style has been evident in the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981), with music by Geoffrey Burgon, and costume dramas such as Jude (1996), with music by Adrian Johnston, and the cinema remake of Brideshead Revisited (2008). This has cohered into a production strategy involving an alliance of images of the English upper classes, large country houses, and incidental music inspired by so‐called ‘classical music’, usually nineteenth‐century orchestral concert‐hall music or chamber music. However, this tradition of ‘English pastoral’ orchestral music is often less evident in British film than scores more generally influenced by European classical and early Romantic period art music. This is evident in Michel Legrand’s strident mock baroque music for Joseph Losey’s The Go Between (1971) while Stanley Kubrick’s Irish‐focused Barry Lyndon (1975) prominently used a Handel sarabande. Perhaps a more ‘authentic’ use of English pastoral is Michael Tippett’s music as used in Peter Hall’s singular rural drama Akenfield (1974).2 Mixing a sense of musical irony with scholarship, Michael Nyman presents a blank parody of English music in his Purcell‐inspired The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), and his Mozart‐derived music for Peter Greenaway’s later film Drowning by Numbers (1988). Similarly, Craig Armstrong’s sumptuous and highly distinctive score for the period comedy Plunkett and Maclaine (1999) included both period‐style pieces of music and more modern styles of music. A sense of British ‘quality’ music in films began soon after the coming of recorded sound to films. John Huntley’s (1947) book British Film Music emphasised efforts led by Muir Mathieson, the musical director at London Films, in the 1930 and 1940s to establish high‐class film music in Britain through the exploitation of concert hall music culture and composers (1947, p. 7). Indeed, it was certainly evident in this period that some films exploited incidental music as an attraction. In the 1930s, Mathieson convinced respectable art music composers such as Arthur Bliss and William Walton to write music for the screen. Since then, many British films have tried to incorporate music derived from the classical concert hall as a means of guaranteeing their product’s quality. In 1938, the Quota Act was revised, establishing a minimum budget requirement for the registration of films as ‘British’. Higher budgets aided the resources dedicated to music in film ­production, which paid more than writing concertos or symphonies for the concert hall (Hetherington and Brownrigg 2006, p. 49). While a ‘name’ composer could add a patina of respectability and status to a film, sometimes their approach was unconventional or uncompromising. Art music composers writing for films might think their music too important to be merely subordinated to the requirements of the images and dialogue. A good example of how such music could be a ‘featured’ aspect of a film is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s pre-title screen credit occupying the whole screen at the spectacular inauguration of 49th Parallel (1941).3 Vaughan Williams’s music was not written to film images but composed after he had read the film’s scenario and the prelude for the film has had a separate life as a concert hall piece. Laurence Olivier’s production of Henry V (1945)



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had music by William Walton, which is without doubt a highly impressive and greatly celebrated score. Hubert Clifford noted: ‘Judged by purely musical ­standards the best in this score nears comparison with Walton’s own output for the concert platform. Judged as film music, it is one of the most distinguished and effective scores in recent times’ (Huntley 1947, p. 74). Walton was already well established as a concert composer at this point and had already scored a number of feature films as well as wartime documentaries. The use of ‘classically trained composers’ with art music reputations has led to the production of items outside the cinema, such as disc recordings and concert suites for performance, and consequently to music that was perhaps not so solidly integrated with the film. This latter case has sometimes involved reusing music from films unannounced as such, with probably the best example being Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica based on his score for Scott of the Antarctic (1948). Some British film music has gained an almost ‘legitimate’ reputation as art music. The Promenade Concerts (‘The Proms’) in London has instituted a regular ‘film music prom’ event in recent years. Any consideration of film music, or even British music more generally, would not fail to note Walton’s score for Henry V or Malcolm Arnold’s Oscar‐winning score for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The British film industry lacked the rationalised production line that ­characterised American film production from the 1930 to the 1950s, the heyday of the classical Hollywood studio system. This is not insignificant. Hollywood film music may have been of high quality in terms of performance and recording but tended to follow a strong standardised format. This was not so much the case with British films which were more modest in sound and scale and altogether more artisanal in their methods.4 Unlike Hollywood, with its music departments and large amount of payrolled musicians, British composers and musicians worked only part‐time in the film industry and in the vast majority of cases plied their trade primarily in other areas of musical culture. To a certain extent, this is evident in what might be seen as a lack of craft in many British film scores, with many in the 1930s and 1940s not being written to fit the precise momentary dynamics of film activity on screen. Even in cases of high‐quality productions, it sometimes had the character of music that had been ‘tracked’ or edited into the film. This tended to invest the music with greater ‘autonomy’ as it was not composed to fit a rough cut of the finished film, as was (and largely remains) the case in Hollywood. Consequently, music could become almost ‘semi‐detached’ from the film, as a featured aspect rather than simply being conceived as a functional element primarily providing a support for the images (Donnelly 2007, p. 2). While this emanated partly from the practicalities of the music production landscape in Britain in the 1930s, it was also bolstered by connections between orchestral film music and classical ‘art’ music. This connection was pursued by film producers and musical directors, and was prominent as late as the 1960s with William Walton writing music for The Battle of Britain (1968), although in the final cut most of his music was replaced by that of specialist (and more modest) film music composer Ron Goodwin.

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This instance embodies a simmering debate about British film music: which is more effective? Music written by a great composer or music written by a less ­talented but specialist composer? In terms of the longevity of music, in this case the answer appears to be the latter.5

British Music Films and Pop Music The ‘English pastoral’ music tradition is now only really alive on films and ­television, particularly in costume dramas, and arguably has been superseded by an identification of the British upper classes in television and film with more g­ eneral European art music styles. Consumers of these are, however, less likely to be discerning art music aficionados than ‘middlebrow’ audiences. Earlier British anxiety about the working classes has receded appreciably in recent years, with an expansion of the ‘popular art’ middlebrow culture, so clear in stage shows like Riverdance in the 1990s or television costume dramas such as Downton Abbey (2010–2015). Indeed, the ‘middlebrow’, as discussed by Lawrence Napper (2000), has developed from the perennial success of the London West End stage, and its development at the end of the twentieth century, where it became dominated by musicals. The West End has been massively important since the 1980s, particularly on the back of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s remarkable run of successful stage musicals. Their success has fed directly into both British and Hollywood films and Lloyd Webber has almost singlehandedly given Britain consistent international triumphs. A number of these have been made into successful films, including the American production of Evita (US 1996) and the British production The Phantom of the Opera (2004). However, the epic French‐set musical Les Misérables (2012) was in fact a British ­production despite starring two Australian actors and having its origins in France as a recording and a stage show. During the 1930s, British‐made musicals were among the most popular films in Britain.6 Musicals have been almost ignored in critical and historical commentaries about British cinema. Perhaps this is down to a residual cultural snobbery, as they are a clear manifestation of ‘low culture’ in the face of a desire to see British cinema as an artistic endeavour superior in some ways to Hollywood films, and something connecting with the heritage industry’s hawking of a sense of Britain associated with the aristocratic past (Hill 1999, p. 77). Occupying a wholly different cultural domain, British film musicals have in many cases been adapted directly from the musical stage. London’s West End theatreland remains dominated by musicals, perhaps more in recent years than in the 1930s, the halcyon years of the British musical film. In the 1930s, film musical stars such as Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews, and George Formby were extremely successful at home.7 Yet the fate of the British musical was to wane until the coming of the pop musical and the rock opera in the 1960 and 1970s, and its recent attempts at rebirth in films inspired by the stage with



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films such as Little Voice (1998) and Mamma Mia! (2008), both of which exploited naturalistic ‘out of tune’ singing and eschewed the professionalism of Hollywood. Formby and Fields both had distinctly English regional identities and their films addressed everyday aspects of British working‐class social life. This clearly made their films accessible to large audiences in Britain, dealing as they did with a recognisable world and issues relevant for the British community. These were not ­considered to be the best products of British cinema and have been neglected by historians (Mundy 2007, p. 10). By the 1950s, this ‘parochial’ aspect to musicals remained, with films such as Charley Moon (1956), starring Max Bygraves, exhibiting a sense of modesty and diffidence in comparison with Hollywood musicals. The reality was that Britain was simply unable to compete on the level of resources and imagination, and since the 1940s had been overwhelmed by the audience response to MGM musicals. Since the 1950s, British musicals had been less of a staple of British film production and become more of an occasional production, a situation which mirrors the decline in importance of the film musical in Hollywood. However, some have been extremely successful, such as Oliver! (1968) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). British musicals, like their American counterparts, ­increasingly became a children’s film genre, or tried something totally different, like Swinging London bandwagon‐jumper Smashing Time (1968) or ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), which aimed at more upmarket audiences. Another singular endeavour was Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), a stylized anti‐war film directed by Richard Attenborough and derived from Joan Littlewood’s e­ xperimental Theatre Workshop production. Based on the stage original, it was built around a succession of songs that were popular during the First World War. Ken Russell made a number of music‐based films, the most successful of which was Tommy (1975), based on The Who’s concept album and stage show from the end of the previous decade. To a degree, Russell’s other rock operas attempted to give something of a ‘rock’ treatment to classical composers, cemented by Russell’s ­outrageous visual style and keen sense of spectacular sequences particularly built around music or song sequences. This sense of a more serious musical was sustained by Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), which was based on the group’s concept album and translated to the screen as a ‘rock opera’, with no dialogue and distinct song sequences so much as a continuum of images driven by the music. This 1960 and 1970s renewal of pop musicals entailed radical changes to the established form and content of film musicals, as part of a wider wave of attempting to wipe away tradition. In the 1960s, British culture reconfigured, recasting the upper classes as more proletarian and vice versa, radically reinventing the British establishment and notions about the British Empire. This was embodied by the characterisation of Sean Connery as James Bond. Beginning with Dr No in 1962, the James Bond series has been remarkable for its music as much as its other celebrated aspects. The films aim to project a notion of Britain as a ‘high quality’ country, an international ‘player’ (much like Bond himself as a successful gambler). Not only does the character of Bond and his importance in international espionage reflect Britain’s

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idea of itself as of great international significance, but the music also embodies something of this feeling of British national power and exuberance. In particular, John Barry’s scores of the 1960s manage a careful merger of orchestral atmosphere, rock energy and jazz sophistication.8 While these scores furnished a robust sense of production values to match the expensive location shooting, they also expressed something of the self‐conscious modernity of Britain at this time. Barry’s scores included repeated themes apart from his arrangement of Monty Norman’s Bond theme. Indeed, for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which attempted to rethink the franchise with new Bond, George Lazenby, Barry even introduced a heroic theme for the opening titles which could conceivably have gone on to define the later Bond films. The songs that were written and recorded for each new film were commercially successful and gave added profile to the films. Not all of them were by British artists although it showcased many, including Tom Jones, Matt Monroe, and Shirley Bassey in the early years of the series. Later, there was a ­predominance of American singers. The Bond films appear to exemplify the contemporaneous sense of ‘updating’ British national concerns, in tune with the ­radical developments in the 1960s, and the music is a crucial part of this endeavour, although the songs always appeared rather more of a conservative choice of material than might have been expected. Bond as a representative of the British establishment may never have been convincing, yet the character and the series certainly were a product of the new form that consumer culture was taking. A ‘new’ Britain was defined by a sense of material culture, and with an increasing eye on exports at the expense of material produced for home consumption. This means that the ‘national’ was increasingly defined by overseas taste. Such a development in consumerism was relatively young. Certainly, by the 1960s, popular music was more of a money spinner than classical music. Disc sales were the key and the early 1970s was the peak of record sales internationally (Harker 1994, p. 249), in a constant cycle of boom and slump. There has been a reciprocal relationship between music and films since the early years of cinema, with the mutual promotion of films and sheet music, and later films and recordings (Ewens 1977, p. 384). The Beatles’ debut film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), holds a position unique in cinema. It was the first film, indeed one of the only films, ever to have gone into profit before it opened – on account of sales of the soundtrack album alone. It is a startling film in both visual and sonic terms, one that Andrew Sarris famously called ‘the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies’ (Neaverson 1997, p. 15). According to Robert Murphy, the success of Dr No (1962), Tom Jones (1963), and A Hard Day’s Night inspired Hollywood to invest in British cinema for the rest of that decade (Murphy 1992, p. 112). This American finance allowed an unprecedented and unrepeated boom in British film production for the rest of the decade (Guback 1967, p. 11; Kelly et al. 1966, p. 89), encouraging a degree of experimentation which British feature films had never known before or since. For instance, Paul McCartney wrote the score for The Family Way (1966) and other musicians wanted to show off their abilities. Musical experiments were evident in films such



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as Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), with music by Traffic and the Spencer Davis Group, Wonderwall (1968), with music by Beatle George Harrison, Up the Junction (1968) with music by Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg, The Committee (1968) with music by Pink Floyd, and Performance (1970) with music by Jack Nitzsche and Mick Jagger. This took place at the same time as the massive boom in British pop music that followed the Beatles’ success and the assault on the American charts commonly known as ‘the British invasion’. In fact, it is British pop music that made a significant impact on the American market before (and after) films had (Watts 1975, p. 131). The early 1970s was the period with the highest record sales, and this led to more of an influence of music in British film production. For ­instance, Alan Parker and David Puttnam’s S.W.A.L.K. (1971, aka Melody) built the story around the songs which they had acquired for the film. For That’ll Be the Day (1973), producer Puttnam made a deal with record label Ronco, which saw the record label finance the film in exchange for the rights to the soundtrack album made up of songs they owned. Apparently, the script was reworked to include as many opportunities for music as possible (Yule 1988, p. 86). Record labels also moved into financing films. Examples include Horace Ove’s Reggae (1970), which was produced by Bamboo Records, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971), produced by A and M Records, and Let It Be (1970), Imagine (1972), and Born to Boogie (1972), which were all produced by Apple (the label owned and run by the Beatles). Dance Craze (1981) was produced by Chrysalis Records while Culture Club – A Kiss Across the Ocean (1984), the musical Absolute Beginners, and The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball (1987) were all made for the film arm of Virgin Records. In the 1980s, the development of music television was accompanied by the aggressive and large‐scale exploitation of record label back catalogues, both of which had an impact on mainstream cinema. Denisoff and Plasketes described the industrial strategy called synergy, involving the co‐ordination of record releases from a film soundtrack as mutual publicity (1990, p. 257). In the early 1980s, dwindling profits as a result of falling record sales caused a conservative retrenchment of the international music industry, which increasingly concentrated on established musical artists rather than new developments. This was boosted by the coming of Compact Discs (CDs) at the end of the decade (Eckstein 1993, p. 45), which allowed record companies to reanimate and resell all their back catalogues. To a degree, this was reflected in films like Absolute Beginners (1986), Trainspotting (1996), and The Full Monty (1997), which made extensive use of musical back catalogues, as have more recent musicals such as Mamma Mia! (2008) with Abba songs and Sunshine on Leith (2013) with the songs of The Proclaimers (Figure 12.1). Absolute Beginners was a massively expensive film musical, and although it included old song recordings, it also had many new ones and took advantage of stars such as David Bowie, whose title song was a hit single. On the other hand, Trainspotting included a diverse range of recordings. Rather than use the 1970s American rock which appears prominently in Irvine Welsh’s original novel, the film exploits the contemporaneous ‘Britpop’ trend with music by Blur and Sleeper, and British electronic

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Figure 12.1  The songs of the Proclaimers: Sunshine on Leith (2013).

dance music of the time with music by Leftfield and Underworld. However, key moments retain connections with the book’s music, using Iggy Pop and Lou Reed songs for arguably the film’s most memorable sequences. Trainspotting managed an uncertain negotiation of the US rock that characterises the book and more modern UK music, although the film was influential and the soundtrack albums sold well.9 At the time, other British films exploited the contemporaneous explosion of so‐called ‘Britpop’, with Boston Kickout (1995) including Primal Scream and Oasis, House of America (1996) including Blur and Primal Scream, The Full Monty (1997) including Pulp, while The Acid House (1998) included Primal Scream and Oasis. Guy Ritchie’s debut feature film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) featured a succession of Britpop songs.

Musical Traditions and Ireland A similar trajectory might be traced in Irish film. What many considered a more ‘legitimate’ and indigenous musical tradition – in this case, folk music rather than art music – was displaced by internationalised pop and rock, although with Ireland there appears to be a more direct connection between folk and pop. In Ireland, a sense of national culture was in some ways an easier issue but potentially more problematic in relation to the film industry than in Britain. Early twentieth‐century endeavours to establish a national culture focused on traditional folk culture, and thus music was considered of paramount importance. With little indigenous art music tradition, Ireland instead fostered an extremely vigorous folk music culture, which had an increased international profile with the so‐called ‘folk revival’ in America and Britain in the late 1950 and 1960s. However, a strong sense of ‘Celticism’ was evident in the music of certain British composers who identified



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with Ireland, such as Ernest Moeran and Arnold Bax, and British‐based Irish ­composers such as Charles Villiers Stanford. This mixture of Irish melody and orchestral forces, which was evident in Hamilton Harty’s The Children of Lir or Stanford’s Irish Rhapsodies, was to become unmistakable in the scores for films set in Ireland. Films such as Man of Aran (1934), Hungry Hill (1946), Odd Man Out (1947), The Quiet Man (1952), The Gentle Gunman (1952), with music by John Greenwood, This Other Eden (1959), with music by Lambert Williamson, and Ryan’s Daughter (1970) all had ‘Irish‐sounding’ film scores written by non‐Irish composers. Indeed, this tradition arguably has been perpetuated in recent years with experienced American film composer Elmer Bernstein’s music for My Left Foot (1989) and The Field (1990), and Elliot Goldenthal’s less clearly ‘Celtic’ score for Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996). Irish films have a tradition of almost always being co‐productions; as the home market is so small, overseas interests in terms of finance and export opportunities are crucial. In this way, the Irish film industry has a similar but far more extreme problem than that which besets British film production. The usual collaborators are the UK and the USA, and this situation can lead to a problematic ‘tourist view’ representation of Ireland, more agreeable to those outside the country. Ruth Barton has argued that ‘[a]n Irish national cinema is thus defined … as a body of films made inside and outside of Ireland that addresses both the local and diasporic cultures’ (2004, p. 5). As noted, this sometimes has led to a view of Ireland that fits the desires of foreigners who might want a holiday there. Being charitable, this leads to a distillation of the most particular aspects of Ireland into film, or being less so can involve the imposition of certain limited ideas of ‘Irishness’ that have currency abroad. Apart from charming rural folk, leprechauns, and the like, this has also led to a characterisation of Ireland as a heavily musical culture. Of course, this has a basis in truth although a visit to a tourist hotspot such as Kilkenny or Galway might lead one to wonder which is more important: the value of music in Irish culture or the expectations of tourists for a music‐centred Irish culture. This notion of Irish culture as essentially ‘musical’ has led to the prominent use of music in Irish films, and music of a distinct Celtic flavour. ‘Celticism’ involves certain melodic turns, musical forms such as the fast jig or slow lament, and the use of certain instruments. With little classical music tradition to draw upon, Irish folk music has been a major influence. Film such as Joe Comerford’s Traveller (1981) had a score using the uilleann pipes (a more intimate bagpipe than the larger warpipes). The music was by Davy Spillane, the film’s star, but the uilleann pipes have increasingly gained currency in international film music.10 ‘Celticism’ in film music was evident early on. Robert Flaherty’s dramatised ­documentary Man of Aran is a good example of this process. Produced as a British documentary by Michael Balcon at Gainsborough Studios., Flaherty’s film was scored by John Greenwood, a seasoned English composer of music for dramatic films.11 A title card at the start of the film declares that the music was ‘… based on the original Irish songs of the Aran Islands …’. In this way, the film’s original music appears to have

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a degree of authenticity with which to invest the film. British‐made and partly shot in Belfast, Odd Man Out (1947) has impressive music which provides a mixture of Hollywood’s highly developed action‐matching underscoring with the predominantly British mode of autonomous pieces (with their own musical logic) ­counterpointed with screen action. The score was written by William Alwyn, another experienced English film composer. He used Irish‐sounding melodies which, as a contemporary review noted, ‘suggest haunting old Irish airs’ (quoted in Moss 1987, p. 142). Odd Man Out has one repeated and overwhelming funereal main musical theme, attached to the film’s dying Irish Republican Army (IRA) protagonist. The repetition of this main theme, a funeral threnody, renders a kind of stasis, freezing and fetishising the slow action of James Mason’s character Johnny gradually dying across the film. Indeed, the music tells of inevitable death and Alwyn’s music was composed before the film was shot (Moss 1987, p. 143). This makes Odd Man Out a firm exception in British/Irish films. The Hollywood approach to Ireland was perhaps more conventional. John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) had a score by Victor Young. This extremely popular film, starring John Wayne, inaugurated its own tourist industry. Young’s music uses Celtic melodic and rhythmic‐style motifs. Indeed, the score includes many melodies borrowed from traditional Irish folk music, such as the Rakes of Mallow, although it is dominated by the more recent song The Isle of Innisfree. Such songs were not Irish as such but part of the tin pan alley genre of ‘Irish songs’, which were usually highly sentimental and contained key Irish signifiers. Ford’s film provided a similarly sentimentalised tourist view of Ireland that remains popular in America. This approach was sustained with films such as Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) and perhaps less obviously and more problematically with David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), with sumptuous music by French composer Maurice Jarre. These were international productions, in the last case a British‐produced film, and illustrate the difficulty Ireland had with both a home film industry and a home music industry. From the 1950s onwards, the European and American folk revival gave more international status to Irish folk music, and international success in popular music from the 1980s onwards confirmed an Irish strength in music. An important film was Mise Éire (1959, which translates as ‘I am Ireland’), a documentary about the foundation of the Irish state. The music was by Séan Ó’Riada, a prominent Irish composer who was central to the revival of Irish folk music (Figure 12.2). Here, his music is eclectic, mixing folk and other songs as well as more modernist‐inspired musical cues, in what David Cooper has referred to as a ‘post‐colonial’ score (2006). He also provided music for Playboy of the Western World (1963) as part of his ensemble, Ceoltori Chualann. Yet the tradition of Irish song in film was established early on. John Ford’s The Informer (1935) begins on Dublin’s gas‐lit streets with a man on screen singing Rose of Tralee unaccompanied. An indication of how musical Irish culture was considered abroad is the two versions of the musical Rose of Tralee, from 1937 and 1942, both British‐made and concerning an Irish singer going to America. The most successful Irish film musical was



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Figure 12.2  An innovative musical score by Seán Ó Riada: Mise Éire (1959).

The  Commitments (1991), which was shot in Ireland with an Irish cast, using American songs and directed by Englishman Alan Parker. The guitarist in the band in the film, Glenn Hansard, later starred in another successful but isolated film musical, Once (2006). However, rather than becoming dedicated musicals, Irish films tended to foreground music as an integral part of Ireland, almost as if it is a part of the filming location or an ambient element for Irish‐speaking voices. In the 1980s, Irish rock and pop sold well abroad, in the wake of the startling international success of U2. This had an impact on music in Irish films.12 Lamb (1985) was about a priest and a young boy who run away from Northern Ireland to London. Northern Irish singer Van Morrison wrote the music for the film as an occasional project in his highly acclaimed recording and performing career. One of the most significant Irish musicians to cross the divide of popular music and film music was Gavin Friday. He originally had been a part of the Virgin Prunes, an art performance‐inspired post‐punk group from Dublin. Friday and regular collaborator Maurice Seezer worked together on Friday’s solo albums and then the score for In the Name of the Father (1993), supplying a number of songs in collaboration with Sinéad O’Connor and Bono from U2. The underscore for the film was ­written by Trevor Jones, although it used the melody of the end‐titles song You Made Me the Thief of My Heart, which became a hit record. This mixture of pop beat and film music’s traditional orchestral forces has become more prominent in the film music

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of recent years. Friday and Seezer went on to produce a full score for The Boxer (1998), mixing the styles of popular and orchestral music. Indeed, film composers in Ireland developed as a distinct grouping in the 1990s along with the expansion of Irish film production. Composers included Shaun Davey, who scored Waking Ned Devine (1998) among other films, Fiachra Trench, Stephen McKeon, and Derek Gleeson. Using Irish music alongside other music, stage shows Riverdance and Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance were internationally successful. The composers of both, Bill Whelan and Ronan Hardiman, have written music for films. Yet Irish musicians were often featured more often. Last of the High Kings (1997) showcased Thin Lizzy songs, while This is the Sea (1998) used songs by Brian Kennedy and the (pan‐Celtic) Waterboys. Neil Jordan’s first film, Angel (1982), not only concerns a band but also includes highly individual solo saxophone incidental music, which appears to embody the mentality of the saxophone‐player protagonist (Stephen Rea). An excellent example of foregrounded music evident in many Irish films was Neil Jordan’s startling Breakfast on Pluto (2005). This film not only has songs appear as non‐diegetic music for constant dialogue‐free sequences but also includes a number of songs performed diegetically by Gavin Friday, sometimes with star Cillian Murphy. During a sequence where the protagonist Kitten imagines his own o ­ rigins, a comic primal scene is accompanied ironically by Victor Young’s iconic music from The Quiet Man, illustrating the iconic but ambivalent status of both the film and its music.

Conclusion Both British and Irish film music evince a development over time determined by the rise and domination of the popular music industry. Traditions of classical music and folk music were pushed aside by more vigorous and more internationally successful pop and rock music. In Irish films, the strong folk tradition was translated into orchestral film scores (and in parallel into orchestral film pieces for the concert hall). The remarkable success of Irish pop and rock from the 1970s onwards increasingly found a place in films, displacing to some degree the ‘authenticity’ of the folk tradition although managing to retain some sense of being an ‘authentic’ organic musical culture. Both were exploited by notions of Ireland as being a ‘musicalized’ society, an image beloved of overseas consumers. In Britain, the trajectory was less direct with a more general substitution. In the 1920s and 1940s, as part of a ‘campaign’ to project Britain as upmarket, and films as a step away (if that) from art, film scores were procured from respected art music composers for British films (Irving 1959, p. 82). This was a form of conspicuous ­production values that gave a certain status to British films, with music proving a good way to sell films, and vice versa. Yet, this has been particularly true of popular music, and is testified to by the success of songs from musicals outside the film,



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be it as sheet music or as recordings. The prestige stratum of British film ­production was geared towards critical respectability and potential success through gaining distribution in the lucrative American market. However, in the 1960s, British youth culture and popular music became a massive international export and cinema rapidly took advantage of this. This yielded two clear strands in relation to music in British films. One was concerned with upmarket quality, and was tied to heritage costume dramas, while the other was tied to youth and pop or rock music. However, by the 1990s, these two had in some ways converged. In Britain, since the 1980s there had been a strongly developing interest in music as a marketable heritage product. This manifested itself primarily in films about the Beatles, including The Birth of the Beatles (1979), John Lennon: A Journey in the Life (1985), John and Yoko: A Love Story (1985), Hours and the Times (1991), Back Beat (1994), Two of Us (2000), In His Life: The John Lennon Story (2000), The Killing of John Lennon (2006), Sam Taylor‐Wood’s Nowhere Boy (2009), Lennon Naked (2010), and Rubber Soul (2014). One of the striking aspects of these films was that most focus on the early years of the Beatles and have a consequent lack of well‐known Beatles songs. This, of course, was much cheaper for music rights, which inhibited making a film about their later career at the time of writing. Indeed, there has also been a growing interest in the heritage of British film music as well as British popular music. At the turn of the millennium, the Chandos record label released a series of discs ­celebrating the work of British film music composers: Alan Rawsthorne, Richard Rodney Bennett, Malcolm Arnold, William Alwyn, and Arthur Bliss.13 The music in British films has been consistently admired, perhaps more abroad than in Britain, and while British film history might be understood in this manner as a catalogue of high quality musical scores, it is surprising that these have never received the critical attention they deserve. As of 2015, British films had received 12 Oscars from Hollywood for best original score: The Red Shoes in 1948, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, Tom Jones in 1963, The Lion in Winter in 1968, Midnight Express in 1978, Chariots of Fire in 1981, A Passage to India in 1984, The Full Monty in 1997 (as a comedy score), Shakespeare in Love in 1998 (as a comedy score), Atonement (2007), and Slumdog Millionaire (2008).14 This is a remarkable achievement. Film music can be landmarks for differing reasons, either being conferred the status of ‘serious’ music, becoming popular pieces outside the context of the film or influencing the use of music in subsequent cinema. Without doubt, both British and Irish films have had a remarkable heritage of music which has matched, and in some cases exceeded, the fine traditions of music in both countries.

Notes 1 Some of these used the novel serial technique invented by Arnold Schoenberg. For ­instance, Williamson adopted it early on although later he became the Master of the Queen’s Music.

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2 Although the music is his Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, the Italian theme is given a sumptuously English reworking. 3 Huntley notes the value of British film music is enhanced by the involvement of ‘great masters’ (1947, pp. 9–11). 4 Kate Daubney notes that Ealing music scores ‘avoid the grand thematic designs of contemporaneous Hollywood scores’ (2006, p. 60). 5 For example, William Alwyn claimed he disliked his music being noticed and enjoyed as this detracted from its place in the film ( Johnson 2006, pp. 1–2). 6 Discussed in further detail by Sedgwick (1999). 7 Despite their success, these were considered downmarket products and inferior to Hollywood musicals. John Huntley commented: ‘It is not in this sphere [musicals] that our record is so impressive; it is background and featured serious music that we have so successfully employed in British films, especially background music’ (1947, p. 10). 8 Simultaneously, Laurie Johnson’s music for The Avengers (1961–1969) used the same elements (‘classical’ strings, rock beats and sassy jazz brass) to also update and legitimise the British spy establishment. 9 As an index of the impact of Trainspotting’s music, in the wake of the film, the BBC used two songs that the film had used in its advertisements for itself (Lust for Life and Perfect Day). 10 For instance, Hollywood film composer James Horner has used them in a handful of scores, not only for the Irish‐set and themed The Devil’s Own (1997), but also for Titanic (1997), which had Irish elements, and even for Braveheart (1995), which is about Scottish history (although it was shot in Ireland). 11 John Greenwood (1889–1976) scored almost 50 films, including Elephant Boy (1937), The Drum (1938), Pimpernel Smith (1941), San Demetrio, London (1943), Hungry Hill (1947), Eureka Stockade (1949), Quartet (1949), The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), and The Gentle Gunman (1952). Huntley points out that Greenwood was a symphonist and conductor and wrote a vast number of film scores (1947, pp. 206–207). 12 Paul Mayersberg’s Captive (UK/France 1985) used pop‐based music by U2’s guitar player The Edge but tempered it with art composer Michael Berkeley’s orchestral music. 13 Most of the recordings are new ones, by Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic. They include The Film Music of Richard Rodney Bennett (Chan 9867), The Film Music of Arthur Bliss (Chan 9896), and also Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra performing The Film Music of William Alwyn (Chan 9243). There was also a compilation British Film Music (Naxos 85544577) released in 1999. 14 Although this is not straightforward, as a number of recent winners were registered as British co‐productions. Many of the composers are not British, either, while some British composers such as Atticus Ross have received Oscars for American films.

References Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Blom, Eric (1947). Music in England. London: Penguin. Cooper, David (2006). Séan Ó’Riada and Irish post‐colonial film music: George Morrison’s Mise Éire. In: European Film Music (ed. Miguel Mera and David Burnand), 100–115. Aldershot: Ashgate.



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Coyle, Rebecca (1998). Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music. Sydney: AFTRS. Daubney, Kate (2006). Music as a satirical device in the Ealing comedies. In: European Film Music (ed. Miguel Mera and David Burnand), 60–73. Aldershot: Ashgate. Denisoff, R. Serge and Plasketes, George (1990). Synergy in 1980s film and music: formula for success or industry mythology. Film History 4 (3): 257–276. Donnelly, K.J. (2007). British Film Music and Film Musicals. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Eckstein, Jeremy (1993). The music industry. Cultural Trends 5 (19): 45–66. Egorova, Tatiana (1997). Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey. London: Routledge. Ellis, John (1978). Art, culture and quality: terms for a cinema of the forties and seventies. Screen 19 (3): 9–50. Ewens, David (1977). All the Years of American Popular Music. London: Prentice‐Hall. Guback, Thomas (1967). American interests in the British film industry. Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 7 (2): 7–21. Harker, Dave (1994). Blood on the tracks: popular music in the 1970s. In: The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? (ed. Bart Moore‐Gilbert), 240–258. London: Routledge. Hetherington, S.J. and Brownrigg, Mark (2006). Muir Mathieson: A Life in Film Music. Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema of the 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huckvale, David (2008). Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant‐Garde. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Huntley, John (1947). British Film Music. London: Skelton Robinson. Irving, Ernest (1959). Cue for Music. London: Dennis Dobson. Johnson, Ian (2006). William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Kelly, Terence Peter, Norton, Graham, and Perry, George C (1966). A Competitive Cinema. London: Institute for Economic Affairs. Mathieson, Muir (1947). Foreword. In: British Film Music (ed. John Huntley), 7–9. London:  Skelton Robinson. Mera, Miguel and Burnand, David (eds.) (2006). European Film Music. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moss, Robert F. (1987). The Films of Carol Reed. New York: Columbia University Press. Mundy, John (2007). The British Musical Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murphy, Robert (1992). Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI. Napper, Lawrence (2000). British cinema and the middlebrow. In: British Cinema: Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson), 110–123. London: Routledge. Neaverson, Robert (1997). The Beatles’ Movies. London: Cassell. Sedgwick, John (1999). The comparative popularity of stars in mid‐1930s Britain. Journal of Popular British Cinema 2: 121–127. Stillwell, R.J. and Powrie, Phil (2008). Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR: Cultural Politics and Propaganda. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Watts, Michael (1975). The call and response: the impact of American pop music in Europe. In: Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe (ed. C.W.E. Bigsby), 123–139. London: Paul Elek. Yule, Andrew (1988). Enigma: David Puttnam, the Story So Far. Edinburgh: Mainstream.

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Irish Cinema and International Screen Culture Martin McLoone

Introduction In September 2014, just as his latest film Calvary was about to go on international release, filmmaker John Michael McDonagh gave a video interview to Associated Press in which he declared, ‘… I’m trying to get away from the description of the movie as an Irish film … It’s not an Irish film. It’s just set in Ireland with lots of Irish characters.’ This authorial questioning of the film’s identity needs some explanation. McDonagh was aiming here to address an international, rather than a national, audience. He was attempting to define his film as ‘universal’, rather than as merely ‘parochial’, a film that transcends its local setting to address wider themes and concerns. This is a fairly common marketing strategy, repositioning the film to maximise potential audiences; re‐categorising it from the nationally specific to the transnationally generic. McDonagh does not indicate how he himself would prefer the film to be described but it is clear he has made a pitch for some kind of transnational (or post‐national) cinema. However, to achieve this, he ended up launching a quite extraordinary attack on his fellow filmmakers and the whole Irish film industry. ‘I’m not a fan of Irish movies’, he continued. ‘I don’t find them to be that technically accomplished and I don’t find them that intelligent.’ He even attempted to enlist the support of Irish audiences to distance his own film from the body of work that constitutes contemporary ‘Irish cinema’: You see, the problem is they know that lots of Irish films aren’t very good and they’re actually hesitant about going to see the movie themselves. So when you’re making a film there, you’re trying to convince the Irish audience, ‘No, it’s not like all those terrible Irish movies you’ve seen before.’ (Evoke.ie 2014)

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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His remarks were widely reported in Ireland, eliciting much outrage and r­ esentment and generating a heated debate in the Irish media. Central to much of this debate was the fact that McDonagh, a second‐generation Irish Londoner, had received nearly €2 million in funding from the Irish Film Board (IFB) (now known as Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland) for Calvary and his previous film, The Guard (2011). In response to McDonagh’s comments, the chief executive of the IFB, James Hickey, issued a statement designed to retrieve the situation for indigenous filmmaking. He underlined the Board’s commitment to ‘the development of Irish talent in front of and behind the camera and to ensure that Irish audiences have the opportunity to see Irish stories on film’. On the IFB’s role in McDonagh’s films, Hickey continued: The IFB supported both films, which are culturally Irish, stories featuring Irish talent throughout, and is happy to have done so. The excellent work of Irish cast and crew has contributed to making Calvary and The Guard the high quality films they are, which have been seen by audiences in Ireland and all over the world. (Irish Film Board 2014)

Although the controversy earned McDonagh much disdain and resentment, not all commentators in Ireland took issue with him. Nadine O’Regan, for example, made a point about indigenous Irish cinema that is all too familiar to critics of indigenous, Lottery‐funded cinema in Britain. ‘Irish films are often weak affairs, small of budget, limited in scope and marketed poorly. Often, they slip into the cinema like a shadow and fade away just as fast. Irish people don’t go to see them’ (O’Regan 2014, p. 1). This metaphor for films and their theatrical release actually points to the difficulty indigenous cinema faces in finding its space within a marketplace dominated by Hollywood. Indeed, not all films get to ‘slip into the cinema’ at all, given the commercial control of both distribution and exhibition and many Irish films achieve a national audience only when they are screened on television. Most low‐budget features seem to have been made with festival screenings and television/DVD exposure in mind, although the IFB itself states that because it is the only source of public funding for feature films directed towards a cinema release, its primary objective is still ‘to encourage, sustain and promote work in Ireland that is made to be shown on the big screen’ (Irish Film Board 2013, p. 33). The IFB’s laudable aim is not always possible, given the nature of international distribution and exhibition, and it is worth pointing out that this is a problem as well for the much larger and historically more powerful British film industry. According to Stephen Follows (2013), in the UK, only 22% of films with budgets under £500 000 made between 2003 and 2010 were released theatrically within two years. For budgets over £500 000, the figure rises to only 57%. In the same period, only 7% of UK films made were profitable, using the British Film Institute’s estimate of profitability as a box‐office to budget ratio of two or more (and see also Beaumont‐Thomas 2013). In this regard, Irish cinema displays on a smaller scale many of the same characteristics, and raises many of the same issues, that Lottery‐funded cinema does in the UK. British and Irish filmmaking exists in the

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shadow of Hollywood (Irish cinema, despite the occasional feature in Irish, is ­overwhelmingly an Anglophone cinema). Success is often measured in terms of box office so that critically acclaimed directors like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in Britain, or Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, and Lenny Abrahamson in Ireland are considered relative commercial failures. The critical success, festival impact, and later audience size for television screening are all too often seen as secondary to box‐ office success. This critique has been echoed in the UK at the highest political level. In 2012, then Prime Minister, David Cameron called for a refocusing of public ­funding towards more commercially‐driven projects. ‘Our role should be to support the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK ­producers to make commercially successful pictures that rival … the best international productions’ (Pulver 2012). This is the language of international c­ orporatism and neo‐liberal economics (dynamic, entrepreneurial, commercially successful) and calls for the re‐routing of state support towards a cinema that appeals to the existing market, a strategy lacking even the pretence of a cultural or national objective. In Ireland, the IFB did at least retain a cultural agenda (intimated in Hickey’s resonant phrase culturally Irish) but this aspiration had to operate within the parameters of an industry increasingly seen as a commercial enterprise, international in its financing and production and geared towards maximising box‐office returns on a global scale. McDonagh’s comments highlight that there is often a tension ­between what is supported through public funding as indigenous cinema and what filmmakers might aspire to in terms of international cinema practices; or indeed what audiences are accustomed to in terms of the cinema experience. The controversy echoes very closely contemporary debates in academic film studies about what might constitute a national cinema in the first place, and how this notion is challenged through competing conceptions of postnational, transnational, ­international, and even world cinema (Dennison and Hwee Lim 2006; Hjort and Petrie 2007; Vitali and Willemen 2006). However, McDonagh’s comments raise another issue that has more immediate resonance in an Irish context. When he suggests that his film is not like ‘all those terrible Irish movies you’ve seen before’, he is referring not only to the films supported by the IFB and which might be considered ‘indigenous’ but is referencing also a long tradition of representation that has emanated from Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, from the British film industry. There are two sides to this tradition. The first uses political violence in Ireland to paint a sombre view of a people caught up in a seemingly intractable cycle of self‐defeating violence, a culture dominated by resentment and revenge in which basic humanity is lacking. The second, more dominant tradition is much lighter in tone, and presents a sentimental, quirky view of a rural Ireland that exists outside of modernity and history and is populated by amiable bluffers and red‐ haired colleens (Hill 1987, p. 147). This latter is best exemplified in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) but is r­ epresented more recently by films such as The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, USA, 1994), The Matchmaker (Mark Joffe, USA, 1997), Waking Ned (Kirk Jones, UK, 1998), Laws of Attraction (Peter Howitt, UK/IRE, 2004), Leap Year



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(Anand Tucker, USA, 2010) and, in what has been the most reviled of the lot, Holy Water (Hard Times) (Tom Reeve, UK/Ireland, 2009). Despite the great economic and social changes that Ireland has gone through in recent years, these amiable ­stereotypes and ­bumbling buffoons still persist in cinematic representations of Ireland and register on public consciousness as ‘Irish films’. McDonagh’s films (like the plays and films of his brother, Martin, especially In Bruges [2008] and Seven Psychopaths [2012]) make use of the Irish stereotypes found consistently in this tradition of representation but use these to much darker and more subversive ends than merely aping amiable Hollywood tropes. The McDonagh films are reflections on Irish culture from the outside but constructed by an artist with one foot inside the camp and with one eye on the traditions of representation. Calvary, for example, is a film peopled almost entirely by ‘types’, not just familiar Irish stereotypes but allegorical figures that register almost as personifications in a medieval morality play – ‘Lust’, ‘Greed’, ‘Despair’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Redemption’, and ‘Justice’. A film like Calvary, therefore, while obviously playing with the traditions of representation and addressing itself to a contemporary Ireland, can appear, at the same time, cold, didactic, and lacking in empathy. It is, perhaps, no great surprise, then, that critics (and audiences) in Ireland generally responded to Calvary less favourably than elsewhere. Donald Clarke (2014), for example, argued that, despite the sympathetic central performance of Brendan Gleeson as the priest: the real problem is with that didactic, meandering script. The story propels us from one broadly drawn cipher to another without allowing proper momentum to build. Nor does any coherent criticism of contemporary Ireland emerge. McDonagh employs a scattershot nihilism that admits little hope, optimism or analysis.

McDonagh is, nonetheless, well aware of the traditions of representation that have been deeply embedded in Irish culture over many years and have become synonymous with cinematic Ireland, and his own practice is a response to both national and international stereotypes. The history of filmmaking in Ireland and the ­history of academic discourse in film studies in Ireland are characterised by such debates. As the industry has matured and developed, its position as both an expression of national culture and as an offshoot of a global enterprise has impacted on the kinds of film that have been made and the ways in which audiences and critical discourse has responded to them.

Irish Cinema and the Modernist Tradition Irish cinema is, relatively speaking, a recent development, one of the last small national cinemas to have emerged in Europe. In 1958, the Irish government established the Ardmore studios at Bray in County Wicklow to facilitate inward

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investment from both American and British studios and to encourage location shooting as a boost for the growing tourism industry. These were job‐creating strategies in the main and little regard was given to questions of film culture, representation, or the image of Ireland that was being promoted or prolonged. However, the presence of such ‘outsider’ productions inevitably gave rise to ­aspirations within Ireland itself for a more indigenous form of filmmaking, the beginnings of familiar local/global or centre/periphery tensions that are central to the national/transnational debate. In the 1960s and 1970s, an increasingly vocal lobby emerged, supported in large measure by two influential and internationally acclaimed directors who remained in Ireland after shooting some of their films there: the American John Huston and the Englishman, John Boorman. This lobby comprised a group of young filmmakers (including Bob Quinn, Kieran Hickey, Joe Comerford, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Pat Murphy, and Cathal Black) who emerged from Art College or through television (Irish public service television, now RTÉ, had been established in 1962 as Teilefís Éireann). In the 1970s, there was little in the way of public funding for film and independent filmmakers had to struggle to find even the most modest budgets. In their struggle to find funding, this group became an effective lobby on behalf of state funding for film, setting up the Association of Independent Producers (AIP) in 1978. The AIP was supported in turn by an emerging academic film studies lobby that attempted to insert cultural arguments into a debate that had, until then, either been hostile to film’s artistic claims or had focused on film mainly as an industry that could generate jobs and attract inward investment. The argument was made that film was as much a part of national expression as other, subsidised arts such as literature and theatre and that a state funding body should be established to support the development of film in Ireland. In 1981, the government finally established the main funding mechanism in Bord Scannán na h‐Éireann/The Irish Film Board (BSÉ/IFB) and appointed British filmmaker John Boorman as its first Chairman. The funding provided by the Board was modest indeed. It was allocated only IR£200 000 for its first year of operation in 1981, half of which was invested in Neil Jordan’s first feature film, Angel (1982) (and thus was launched the career of Ireland’s most high‐profile and most critically‐successful filmmaker of the last 30 years). The paucity of the funds made available meant that successful projects were compelled to seek further, and more substantial, financing elsewhere (in Jordan’s case, through Channel Four Films in the UK). But the principle of state funding had finally been established and although the Board was suspended in 1987 as a cost‐cutting exercise at a time of deep recession, it was re‐established in 1993 and, as Screen Ireland, continues to be the main ­mechanism for funding independent filmmaking in Ireland. The arguments that were proposed by the film lobby in the 1970s/1980s reflected wider debates in film at the time so that the desire to establish an indigenous cinema was often expressed in terms of a desire to forge a national cinematic identity in opposition to dominant cinema. This is reflected in the first major study of Irish cinema, Cinema and Ireland (Rockett et al. 1987), which championed two



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kinds of engaged filmmaking. On one hand, it proposed a kind of international modernist cinema that would address politically a changing Ireland and one which could respond in a radical voice to existing representations in circulation from dominant cinema. On the other hand, the book also proposed a wider cultural studies approach to understanding questions about identity and argued that by looking into the radical traditions already embedded in Irish popular culture – in melodrama, gothic literature, and romantic fiction  –  dominant and disabling ­traditions could be undermined from within. The former proposed a radical film practice indebted to the international political avant‐garde (Rockett et al. 1987), the latter, a film practice that might grow out of a radical critical engagement with indigenous cultural traditions (Gibbons 1984). In fact, both approaches to indigenous filmmaking were already evident in the small but growing body of films that were emerging from Ireland in the late 1970s/early1980s. The films of Bob Quinn, Joe Comerford, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, and Pat Murphy were radical in both form and content, exploratory avant‐garde narratives that probed at questions of Irish identity in both contemporary and historical contexts. Hickey and Black and a number of other directors chose a more conventional narrative approach but took a critical look at contemporary Ireland and, in so doing, offered a politically‐charged reassessment of Ireland’s rural traditions and its largely ignored urban culture (Rockett in Rockett et al. 1987, pp. 127–141; McLoone 2000, pp. 131–150). It is hardly surprising that the generation of Irish filmmakers that emerged in these years would respond to both the dominance of cinematic stereotypes from abroad as well as the changing economic, social, and cultural environment ­internally. In other words, the films they produced attempted a radical reassessment of Ireland’s cinematic identity. Their avant‐garde sensibility and their politically challenging films resembled an Irish version of ‘Third Cinema’ political filmmaking and the kind of ‘national cinema’ which it portended was neither prescriptive nor essentialist but rather constituted a ‘cinema of national questioning’ (McLoone  2006, pp. 88–99). At the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, two such films (Cathal Black’s Pigs, a naturalistic look at the lives and culture of Dublin inner‐city squatters, and Pat Murphy’s feminist historical drama Anne Devlin) were shown out of competition. Later the same year, Anne Devlin ran for six weeks in a Dublin city‐centre cinema and made a considerable impression on the festival circuit, including two screenings at the Montreal festival that were well attended and warmly received. Significantly, though, there was one other Irish film at Cannes that year which was in competition. Pat O’Connor’s much more commercial and conventional narrative film Cal was produced by David Puttnam and financed through a combination of British sources (Enigma and Goldcrest) and Hollywood (Warner Bros) and went on to win the best actress award for Helen Mirren. The fact that three Irish films showed up at Cannes that year was significant, announcing to the international community that a new cinema was emerging, but there was clearly a contrast in scale, ambition, and intention as well as in budget between

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Cal and the two more experimental and low‐budget films. In retrospect, what the Festival demonstrated was that if Irish national cinema were to emerge in what was a peripheral cinema culture, it would only do so successfully with the financial clout of the international film industry and by adhering to or adapting dominant cinematic forms. When the first Film Board was closed down in 1987, the period of avant‐garde experiment was effectively over.

Irish Cinema and ‘Trickle‐down’ Funding The re‐launch of the Film Board in 1993 attempted to address the dichotomy of establishing a local film industry in a cinematic culture dominated by a global cinema. In introducing his package of measures to stimulate film culture in Ireland in 1993, the then‐Minister, Michael D. Higgins (elected President of Ireland in 2011) identified his project as the integration of ‘indigenous energy’ and the ‘commercial space that tax incentive creates’ (Higgins 1995). Higgins here refers to a tax ­incentive scheme that was first introduced by a previous government in 1987 (as Section 35 of that year’s Finance Act) as a replacement for the suspended Film Board. When he re‐launched the Board in his own 1993 package, he also extended and improved Section 35. Despite periodic fears that it might be scrapped, the scheme has been retained and updated on several occasions since (and is now known as Section 481). The scheme encourages both individual and corporate investment in filmmaking by allowing investment to be written off against tax. Although the revisions under Higgins allowed for investment in Irish films, its major function remains to attract to Ireland large‐scale film production from abroad. From January 1, 2015, Section 481 was enhanced with the rate of tax relief increased and the criteria for eligibility greatly expanded. All projects that apply for the tax relief under the scheme must meet three out of eight designated cultural criteria that are designed to ensure that the productions contribute in a meaningful way to Irish film culture (Irish Film Board 2015a). The strategy marked an important turning‐point for film production in Ireland. On the one hand, although committed to diversity in the kind of films it would support, the new arrangements effectively killed off the more experimental, avant‐ garde (and more directly political filmmaking) that had been a feature of the ­earlier period in the 1970s/1980s. On the other hand, however, it established Irish film production on a more secure and more professional basis. In fact, the Higgins package of 1993 consisted of a total support strategy for all aspects of film production, education, and training. Each element of an elaborate infrastructure was put in place: the Film Board for indigenous production; the Screen Commission for location promotion; the Film Institute for cultural exhibition, educational, and archival activity; and Screen Training Ireland to co‐ordinate all aspects of training. For the first time as well, the state broadcaster, RTÉ, was required to commission



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a percentage of its production from the independent sector and in response set up the Independent Production Unit (IPU). The package was designed to allow for three levels of film funding and film activity, from mega‐budget Hollywood location shoots through mid‐budget Irish co‐productions to small‐scale, low‐budget, indigenous films, including material originated primarily for television. This attempt to bridge the gap between film‐as‐commerce and film‐as‐art/culture ­represented the beginnings of a fully comprehensive film culture in Ireland as well as the establishment of a film industry. For too long in Ireland, film had suffered by being seen as either a low‐quality entertainment and a distraction dangerous to public morality or an expensive luxury that the State could not afford. Filmmaking (and cinema attendance) had traditionally lacked the kind of cultural legitimacy or economic clout that the new arrangements were designed to bestow on film’s ­halting progress. From the outset, the strategy had its critics, especially in relation to the balance between inward productions on a grand scale and more low‐key indigenous material. The strategy’s initial big successes seemed to augur well for its international intentions at the expense of the indigenous. The most famous success of the scheme (or the most notorious, depending on which side of the Irish Sea is involved) was in 1995 when Higgins himself persuaded Mel Gibson to move his production of Braveheart from Scotland to Ireland. A cynical Fintan O’Toole (1995) noted the film’s poor grasp of historical nuance, its brash Celtic masculinity and its portrayal of the English as effete and duplicitous perverts (Anglophobia and homophobia together) and ­wondered ‘Is this what the so‐called Irish film industry is for?’ There was also the fear that the tax incentives would prove more lucrative to such big‐budget films than to riskier, smaller indigenous films. The then‐editor of Film Ireland noted at the time ‘it is becoming increasingly harder for small Irish film makers to put together attractive Section 35 proposals in the face of competition from the likes of Mel Gibson’s Brave Heart [sic] or (Disney‐backed) The Old Curiosity Shop’ (quoted in McManus 1994). Other high‐profile productions attracted to Ireland because of the tax incentives were Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), Rob Bowman’s Reign of Fire in 1992 and Antoine Faqua’s King Arthur (2004). The ‘trickle‐down’ impact of these ­productions can be significant. According to one estimate (independent producer Morgan O’Sullivan), Reign of Fire received IR£2.7 million through Section 481 but the production then spent a total of IR£35 million on Irish goods and services. The problem with relying solely on such trickle‐down economics, however, is also ­eloquently articulated by the same producer: ‘We’re a branch office to America in other business fields – why not in film?’ (interviewed in Duffy 2003, p. 32). The situation 20 years after the Higgins package was introduced suggests that the Irish Film industry has been successfully integrated into both British and American screen culture and, as the controversy over McDonagh’s comments ­vividly illustrates, the debate about Ireland’s indigenous presence within this remains just as pertinent as it did then. According to official IFB figures (Irish Film Board 2015b),

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the Irish film industry in 2013 was estimated to be worth in excess of €550 million, employing over 6000 individuals, with over 560 small and medium‐sized ­enterprises operating in the sector. The IFB invested €7.5 million in production which enabled Irish producers to raise a further €59.5 million, all of which was invested in Irish goods and services. In 2014, the IFB supported 15 Irish feature films, 11 creative feature co‐productions, 11 short films, 4 feature documentaries, 2 TV dramas and 4 animated TV projects. In the period after 2003, the number of features supported by the IFB nosed towards 200, many involving complex funding arrangements with American companies, European agencies, and especially UK film and television companies. 2014 saw high levels of foreign direct investment with a large number of high‐profile film and TV productions filming on location in Ireland, including the third series of the History channel’s Vikings and the BBC’s Ripper Street, as well as a second series of the Showtime Network/Sky Atlantic production, Penny Dreadful. There was also particular press and public excitement about the announcement in 2014 that the latest episode of the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens chose Skellig Michael off the coast of Co. Kerry as a film ­location. The IFB maintains that such high‐profile international productions not only bring inward investment and generate spend in the Irish economy but that the Irish locations featured then provide a considerable post‐screening boost to tourism (in an interview in 2013, Michael Hirst, the creator of Vikings claimed that 70% of the first series was shot outdoors in its Irish locations). The IFB (2015b) notes that as long ago as 2010, 20% of all tourists cited film as an influencing factor on why they visited Ireland. The name change in 2018 to Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland was to reflect this broader international dimension and its economic impact across the whole economy. The situation in Northern Ireland offers many parallels.

Northern Ireland as Westeros Northern Ireland, as part of the UK, is of course subject to a British rather than an Irish structure of film funding, though today, the North and South work closely together to support filmmaking across the whole island. This is hardly surprising since the situation in Northern Ireland displays many similarities to that in the South and its history of development follows a similar trajectory. Just as was the case in the Republic of Ireland, until relatively recently, there was very little film production in Northern Ireland. In the 1930s, actor/singer Richard Hayward attempted to start up a small film production industry, but there was little economic or political interest, and after a number of small‐scale comedies – The Luck of the Irish (1936) and The Early Bird (1936) – indigenous feature filmmaking in Ireland ceased to exist for the next four decades (Hill 2006, pp. 19–45). Some ­location filming did take place in Northern Ireland, most notably Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (GB, 1947), set and partly filmed in Belfast which provided the template for many such ‘Troubles’ films in the decades which ­followed. As was the case in



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the South, film in Northern Ireland held little in the way of cultural legitimacy and when considered by government, tended to be seen in terms of its propagandistic, economic, or tourist potential (Hill 2006, p. 162). The impetus for change came again from an alliance of independent ­f ilmmakers, film academics, and film writers who, by the 1980s, felt that a region represented so negatively in the international media as a news story, should have some means of representing itself to the outside world. This lobby group established the Northern Ireland Film Council, which has evolved today into the main support body, Northern Ireland Screen (NI Screen). From its beginnings, the lobby in Northern Ireland set out to inject the cultural argument for state sponsorship of film into a fairly hostile cultural climate and this was the dominant rationale behind the early initiative. Since then, however, again in parallel with d­ evelopments in both Britain and Ireland, NI Screen has folded the cultural aspect of film into economic, business, and commercial imperatives. It is currently funded by Invest Northern Ireland (Invest NI), the regional business development agency set up by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment to grow the local economy, and this explains its strong interest in attracting inward development from the international screen industry. NI Screen also administers Lottery funding for film in Northern Ireland and although it retains a strong role in supporting film culture generally through a range of training, archive, and educational initiatives, its main strategy has been to attract inward investment. In 2013, NI Screen published Opening Doors, its strategy for the years 2014–2018, phase one of its ambitious aim of establishing Northern Ireland as ‘the strongest screen industry outside of London in the UK and Ireland within 10 years’ (Northern  Ireland Screen 2013, p. 2). This ambition is built upon the unprecedented success of Home Box Office’s Game of Thrones, all eight seasons of which used major locations and studio space in Northern Ireland. This became the biggest TV production in Europe and has brought substantial benefits to the Northern Irish economy. ‘The first four seasons brought a direct economic benefit of £82 million, according to the local assembly, including wages for cast and crew, hotels, services, and tourism, and has created the equivalent of more than 900 full‐time and 5700 part‐time jobs in a region of fewer than 2 million people’ (Addley 2014). Indeed, such has been the success of the location shooting that the fictional kingdom at the centre of the drama, Westeros, has been adopted in tourist information as a name for Northern Ireland itself (‘Welcome to Westeros’, a sign at Belfast’s International airport announced in 2014). Many of the locations used in the series – on the famed Causeway north coast, in Tollymore Forest Park, and the Mourne mountains – are now firmly on the international tourist trail and visitors to Northern Ireland can now enjoy a ‘Game of Thrones’ tour to accompany their ‘Troubles’ tour. There have been a number of other high‐profile international successes that further reinforce such ambition. NI Screen was a partner with the BBC in three series of the thriller, The Fall, which was one of the Corporation’s biggest critical and audience successes in 2013–2014. (The BBC also shot seasons two to five of the highly‐acclaimed

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Figure 13.1  Northern Ireland punk: Good Vibrations (2012).

police series, Line of Duty, in Belfast between 2013 and 2018.) The critical acclaim for the NI Screen supported Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’Sa, Glenn Leyburn, UK/ Ireland, 2012) (Figure 13.1), the Oscar win for the short film The Shore (Terry George, UK, 2011) and the BAFTA win, and Oscar nomination, in 2015 for the short film, Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox, UK, 2015) have also boosted the reputation of Northern Ireland film and added to the confidence that NI Screen’s policy ­document demonstrates. There can be no doubt that the infrastructure for film in Northern Ireland is now greatly enhanced with the success of Game of Thrones. The most spectacular development has been in studio space. The old paint hall at the former Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast has been developed into the Titanic studios with three large sound stages (where Game of Thrones is based) and further studio space has been developed at the old Linen Mill just outside Belfast. In 2017, the new Belfast Harbour studios opened on an 8 acre site with two 32,000 sq. feet sound stages and 36,000 sq. feet of purpose built production offices. (These developments represent the realignment of the Northern Ireland economy from one dependent on heavy industry and large‐scale Fordist production to an economy built on leisure and tourism and it is symbolic of the shift that the spaces of that industrial past have been successfully adapted as spaces for the production of screen entertainment.) There has been substantial upgrade also in training so that in‐coming productions can now avail themselves of experienced production crews and location expertise. NI Screen also offers a detailed advisory service for all in‐coming productions. And yet, despite all this success, some reservations about the overall strategy still persist. During 2010, this impressive infrastructure was used by Universal Pictures to make the $49 million sword‐and‐sorcery comedy Your Highness (David Gordon Green, US, 2011), a film that contributed much to the economy of Northern Ireland while adding little in the way of cultural enrichment to anyone.



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And Terry George, the director of the Academy award‐winning short, The Shore, observed in an interview in 2011: I have to voice a note of caution as the big studios and the big productions can vanish just as fast as they appeared, so while it’s wonderful to have HBO and NBC/Universal there, if local productions, local film makers and local talent are not given long‐term financial and structural support, we’ll be left with empty studio space and a lot of people having to go abroad to find work. (quoted in McDonald 2011)

Even in its ambitious strategy document, NI Screen admits that in catering for the international screen industry, it has committed less funding for local independent filmmaking than the Irish Film Board in the South, despite the fact that it was originally set up to support local filmmaking rather than to facilitate inward production. In its subsequent strategy, NI Screen committed itself to a ­substantial increase in its support for the local industry while maintaining and enlarging its activities with the international film industry (Northern Ireland Screen 2013, p. 19).

Film in Ireland: The National in the Global? It is difficult, therefore, to characterise filmmaking in Ireland as a ‘national’ cinema, at least in any narrow, essentialist definition of the term. Not only, as we have seen, is activity funded by different national bodies across two political jurisdictions, the strategies on both sides of the border follow a similar pattern that emphasises the importance of the international screen industries as drivers of both economic growth and trickle‐down cultural development. Both the Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland in the South and Northern Ireland Screen in the North seek to work with the internal national and external European support agencies but to do so in collaboration with the international industry (especially in the UK and the US). In this regard, then, rather than seeing the situation as a national cinema in itself, it is better to see the developments in Ireland, North and South, as the successful integration of Ireland into international screen culture. This does not, of course, preclude the development of local independent filmmaking but it does mean that this independent sector is supported within this wider screen culture, living within it rather than offering an alternative to it and therefore having to adhere to a greater extent to the aesthetic conventions of that culture. It seems impossible now to envisage any way in which the more experimental, politically‐engaged cinema of the 1970s/1980s could be accommodated within this culture. It might be noted, as well, that this international screen culture is now d­ ominated as much by high‐end television production (like Game of Thrones or Vikings) as it is by large‐scale studio film production and both state funding agencies in Ireland

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have given a high priority to attracting such television production. Increasingly as well, film and television production are seen as part of the ‘creative industries’ that also includes computer games, digital animation, software development, mobile technologies, and related activities. This has greatly expanded the concept of screen culture and widened the areas of creativity that the funding agencies support. However, the question remains to what extent all this international activity in Ireland has helped or hindered the development of a culturally‐specific film culture within the global market. Certainly, some specific areas have been addressed. In Ireland, the special sensitivities over questions of cultural identity have meant that there are schemes in place in both jurisdictions to support audio‐visual culture in the Irish language (and more controversially, also in Ulster‐Scots in Northern Ireland). The number of films made is small and most material in these languages is made for local television rather than for wider audiences. The fact remains, though, that film production in Ireland, North and South, is now promoted within an international framework and is geared towards facilitating the global industry. Does this mean that the notion of a national cinema culture is redundant?

Transnational Cinema and Genre Since at least the 1990s but especially in the 2000s, the term ‘transnational cinema’ has emerged as a way of theorising the complex interchange between the local and the global in cinema and to explain the increasingly labyrinthine relationships that now exist within film production and distribution. The term is also offered as a corrective to what is often seen as the theoretically limiting concept of the national, dismissed as both essentialist and prescriptive and increasingly irrelevant to the nature of contemporary film production, distribution, and consumption (Higson 2000; 2002). Certainly, the notion of transnational cinema does explain with greater nuance the full cinematic experience of a small country like Ireland, dependent on the international industry for financing and production and whose audiences largely consume the films provided by international distribution. Increasingly as well, as Ireland’s success as a source for high‐end international television series has shown, the concept of the transnational better captures the subsequent intermeshing of the local and global. The concept of transnational cinema also has implications for the two classic approaches to film studies – genre and auteur criticism – both of which can inform but also cut across the national cinema paradigm. Certainly, in the world of global film finance, the notion of a national auteur seems naïve since s/he must now straddle such a diverse range of transnational funding structures, with such an array of competing commercial expectations, that a purely ‘personal’ or ‘national’ expression is impossible. However, the transnational paradigm seems to suggest that a genre‐based approach to the study of indigenous cinema would better



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acknowledge these economic realities while complicating cinema’s status as national allegory. Perhaps this explains why, in relation to Irish film studies, there has been a veritable rallying cry in the last decade for generic approaches to ­understanding Irish films. As Brian McIlroy says in his edited collection Genre and Cinema, the book sets out: [to] begin a discussion of Irish and Irish‐related cinema through the lens of genre theory and criticism; to cover a range of genres and subgenres and account for their presence or emergence; and to open new ways of looking at Irish Cinema, s­ pecifically within a transnational perspective. (McIlroy 2007, p. 1)

And in the same volume, Dervila Layden voiced considerable irritation when she argued that within Irish film studies: ‘in not one of the authoritative texts ­written to date … does the intersection of genre and nation or indeed the larger system of genre per se receive any sustained analysis’ (Layden 2007, p. 28). Emma Radley goes further and argues, using the formulation proposed by Andrew Higson, that while it is difficult to see the indigenous as either pure or stable, understandings of Irish cinema remain wedded to this view and that Irish genre cinema or a genre‐based critique of Irish cinema has been neglected (Radley 2013, p. 115). This drive towards a more genre‐based criticism, then, marks the increasing frustration that many scholars now feel towards an approach to Irish cinema based solely on a national cinema paradigm. Before looking at genre in Irish cinema more closely, it is worth considering the national and the transnational in more detail. The opposition of the two, and their relationship to genre are considerably more complex and more contradictory than has often been argued. Transnational cinema might indeed better describe the total cinematic e­ xperience of a small country like Ireland but, as Higbee and Lim point out, the one nuance it does not account for is the imbalance of power – political, economic and, most crucially, ideological – between the local and the global, the centre and the periphery, the coloniser and the colonised (Higbee and Lim 2010, p. 9). In Irish film studies, this is the crucial limitation that the national is often invoked to address. Indeed, the whole Cinema and Ireland project is premised on precisely this imbalance. As the authors argued as long ago as 1987: ‘Ireland’s peripheral (and ex‐colonial) status has not simply hampered the possibilities for a native film industry but, in its absence, has made possible a set of cinematic representations which have tended to sustain a sense of cultural inferiority’ (Rockett et al. 1987, p. xii). Rockett and Hill’s promotion of political modernism and Gibbons’ radical nationalism were attempts to address this sense of inferiority but their projects, whether they can be deemed prescriptive or not, were certainly anti‐essentialist: inclusive rather than exclusive, challenging rather than complacent, and premised on the notion that identity was flexible and fluctuating. The rationale here was to try to open up a cinematic space that allowed Irish image‐making to flourish on its own terms, the better to address those ­representational issues that result from a one‐way relationship to the global industry.

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By the time McLoone published his study of Irish cinema (Irish Film, 2000), the economic and cultural climate had changed considerably. The reconstituted IFB had been operating for seven years by then and the nature and impact of the ‘trickle‐down’ funding were clearer than could have been envisaged back in the late 1980s. The major change, of course, lay with the Irish economy itself, which had grown into the phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger, delivering Ireland from economic backwater into the mainstream of neo‐liberal global capitalism. The cinema of 1990s onwards emerged, McLoone argued, from this very different c­ ontext. The radical, avant‐garde context of the 1970s and the left‐wing politics that sustained a more experimental cinema had been superseded by commercial imperatives that dovetailed the economics of capital and the neo‐liberal political culture that promoted the market‐place rather than the public sphere. In this climate, there was little space or appetite for a politically‐engaged modernist cinema. That moment had passed. ‘Indigenous cinema’, McLoone argued, ‘exists in an in‐between world of the local and the global … The dialectical strains that result are what make this cinema interesting.’ And he reiterated what he saw as the critical task of academic film studies: ‘Even if these films are not politically engaged, they can be engaged with politically’ (McLoone 2000, p. 168). McLoone had earlier proposed an Irish ‘cinema of national questioning’ (McLoone 1994, p. 168) rather than one of bland assertion or one that adhered to a prescriptive project. He emphasised the ­importance of a critical discourse that is informed by wider global issues and described Ireland and Irish culture as being ‘liminal’ and ‘in‐between’. His concept of a national cinema was an altogether different notion to that of a nationalist cinema and to the limiting and prescriptive discourse that Higson locates in national cinema approaches. Paul Willemen has argued this point in another context: ‘Compared to US black films, black British films are strikingly British, and yet in no way can they be ­construed as nationalistic. They are part of a British specificity, but not of a British nationalism …’ (Willemen 2006, p. 33). In the Irish context, filmmaking may well exist as part of the global culture of image‐making but this does not, in itself, mean than the films are free‐floating signifiers. Willemen goes on to argue in relation to a notion of ‘the national’: ‘The issue of national cinema is … primarily a question of address, rather than the film‐maker’s citizenship or even the production finance’s country of origin’ (Willemen 2006, p. 33). For McLoone, as well, the issue is one of address and despite the international context of their production, and the fact that indigenous cinema is promoted within the culture of global image‐making, what is interesting, even defining, is their mode of address and how they respond to the presence of the global in a local setting. Writing in a British context this time, John Hill has offered a similar notion of a cinema of uncertainty in relation to British cinema of the 1980s and 1990s: For it is clear that the certainties concerning the ‘nation’ upon which many earlier films relied no longer prevailed in films of the period. British films … may, in many



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cases, have continued to address national concerns, or employ a strategy of national allegory. However, in the main, they did so not to project a unified notion of national identity and national culture but in order to offer a much more fluid, hybrid, and plural sense of ‘Britishness’ than earlier British cinema generally did. (Hill 1999, p. 241)

It might also be noted that, as long ago as 1994, Hill and McLoone were editors of a volume entitled Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe which was premised on the notion that film was increasingly a transnational form that refused to be contained within a national paradigm. The notion of transnational cinema does advance our understanding of the international nature of film production, distribution, and exhibition and it helps to position Ireland’s film industry within its global frame. However, it is not itself a totalising concept and cannot explain the crucial question of film representations, nor account for the sheer diversity of national contexts in which this global image‐making takes place. It may, indeed, qualify the national, but the Irish experience suggests that it does not displace it or supersede it as a critical tool for understanding that image‐making. As transnational theory itself points out, the idea of the national (not nationalism) still has a deciding role to play in understanding the cultural products of this ­liminality. Perhaps one of the ironies of globalisation in general and global cinema in particular is the fact that nations and national cinemas, despite the p­ ressures exerted by transnational capital flows, refuse to fade away. Dudley Andrew (2006) notes the irony and argues that despite the emergence of other ways of theorising film culture, we still parse the world by nations. Film festivals identify entries by country, college courses are labelled ‘Japanese Cinema’, ‘French Film’, and textbooks are coming off the presses with titles such as ‘Screening Ireland’, ‘Screening China’, ‘Italian National Cinema’, and so on.

(Though it is rare to see studies labelled ‘American National Cinema’ or ‘Screening the USA’.) Indeed, in its pursuit of new markets and new ways to reach ‘niche markets’, it might be argued that globalisation actually encourages and ­promotes cultural diversity, rather than undermines it and that it liberates national formations internally by encouraging minority sub‐national groupings to emerge into the global market‐place. In this formulation, Hollywood’s global presence provides the necessary model against which we both recognise and celebrate diverse national ‘others’. The proponents of a genre‐based criticism, it is true, detect unease among some of the established academic critics about the price that is often paid when Irish films adopt generic conventions. McLoone has explored the generic problems that he sees in the failure of Joe Lee and Frank Deasy’s Dublin thriller, The Courier (1988). He argues, however, that for an urban thriller, it is not American enough in one crucial aspect of its genre conventions, its urban iconography

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(McLoone 2007, p. 2005). In another context, he argues that Alan Parker’s The Commitments (1991) adapts Roddy Doyle’s original novel as a Hollywood‐style musical, and inevitably recycles some Irish clichés (though he also acknowledges the way in which both films helped to create an urban landscape that had traditionally been poorly served by Irish cinema). John Hill forensically analyses how the film noir generic conventions of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) impose a certain set of meanings on the film and applies genre theory in general to unravel and expose the film’s dominant representations of political violence in Ireland (Hill 1987, pp. 147–193). Perhaps, as well, critics like McIlroy, Layden, and Radley detect an anti‐Hollywood sensibility in the work of the earlier critics that is at odds with the actual cinematic experience of Irish audiences (This is certainly one of Higson’s main arguments in relation to discourses on British cinema.) Again, this might be to overstate the case, since in all the academic work that has been criticised for not engaging with genre and the popular (and this also includes Pettitt 2000 and Barton 2004), the authors have been at pains to point out how important Hollywood cinema has been in broadening Irish cultural experience. Indeed, McLoone notes Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith’s argument that compared to the class‐ridden snobberies of British cinema, American cinema has offered a classless democratic voice and has concurred with Rockett that, in Ireland, Hollywood ‘provided an attractive and perhaps liberating alternative to official ideologies’, especially the constricting Catholic nationalist ideology that held sway in Ireland down to the 1960s (McLoone 2000, p. 97). He then pursues the positive and liberating nature of popular Hollywood cinema in Catholic, nationalist Ireland (McLoone 2000, pp. 188–195) in a detailed examination of Paul Quinn’s This Is My Father (1998), while Christine Gledhill, in her e­ xamination of the intersection of genre and nation, revisits the same argument, applying Miriam Hansen’s concept of ‘vernacular modernism’ to the debate (Gledhill 2007, pp. 15–16). For most of the 1980s and 1990s, it would be difficult to argue that the emerging Irish cinema developed its own recognisable genre cinema and this might explain the lack of a systematic application of genre theory to Irish films. Irish filmmakers, of course, were not slow to employ traditional genres to their own explorations of Irish culture. Joe Comerford’s Reefer and the Model (1987), for example, marries a road movie heist to a metaphysical art movie and by setting both in the west of Ireland achieves an absurdist comic effect while exploring a changing Irish landscape. Both Lance Pettitt (2004) and Barry Monahan (2007a) have explored the way in which the gangster genre has been mobilised in Irish cinema (the tropes of ‘cops and robbers’) and Monahan in particular offers a detailed analysis of how genre conventions can be enabling rather than disabling in their application to Irish subject‐matter. Monahan also notes in passing how Western genre tropes (‘cowboys and Indians’) have been mobilised to explore Irish landscape, especially the west of Ireland landscape, in a range of films as diverse as Mike Newell’s Into the West (1994), Gilles MacKinnon’s Trojan Eddie (1995), and Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1997). The definitive academic discussion of this tendency was published right at the beginning of both Irish filmmaking and Irish film studies by Luke Gibbons in his influential essay ‘Synge, Country and Western’ (1984).



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The two classic genres of Hollywood – the western and the gangster – could be and have been referenced and played with in Irish cinema but Irish locations and Irish subject‐matter are hardly conducive to an actual recreation of these classic genres. Ireland does, however, possess the iconographic and thematic tropes of another classic genre, that of the Gothic horror film. There is, of course, a strong Irish Gothic tradition in literature and the work of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu in particular has been foundational in the emergence of cinematic horror in general. In addition, Ireland’s position on the Celtic periphery of metropolitan culture, its pre‐modern otherness, has meant that it shares with other remote ­cultures – Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, off‐shore islands generally – an ideal setting for the Gothic imagination where strangeness, primitive beliefs, folkloric traditions, and locations resonant of the past coalesce into a challenge to rationality and realist traditions. The Gothic has played a key role in many Irish films and Irish‐ themed films down the years, drawing on folklore, rural settings, cavernous ­mansions, and castle ruins to conjure up the unstable world of the spectral and the uncanny. In one of Neil Jordan’s most under‐rated films, High Spirits (1988), these genre tropes are gently satirised while the metropolitan assumptions that gave rise to them are systematically undermined. Given this Gothic tradition, it is hardly a surprise that in recent years, Irish cinema has developed its own sub‐genre of low‐budget Gothic horror. The models for these genre films lie outside of Ireland, in low‐budget American and British horror (Roger Corman produced a series of made‐for‐cable films in Ireland in the late 1990s and, in the early 2000s, the success of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) was an inspiration for a series of Irish ‘rom‐com‐zom’ comedy‐horror films). The cycle probably began with Robert Quinn’s Dead Bodies (2003), a Gothic horror in the mode of Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (1994) but gained momentum in the mid‐decade with Conor McMahon’s Dead Meat (2004), Billy O’Brien’s Isolation (2005), Stephen Bradley’s Boy Eats Girl (2006), and Paddy Breathnach’s Shrooms (2007). Although these films are cheerfully ripping off (or ripping into) the zombie and slasher conventions, they nonetheless, make culturally specific references to their Irish context. As Emma Radley argues, these films ‘do not just copy or mimic generic codes, they resignify them, transforming the monologic and monolithic “body” of Irish cinema as they go’ (Radley 2013, p. 113). In relation to Isolation, Barry Monahan makes the argument that genre films need not necessarily end up as comic parodies of the international style. The film, he maintains, ‘displays consistent creativity in its application, evocation and arrangement of the language of the horror genre’ and the rural setting of the film and its theme of bovine‐spread infection give it a particular cultural resonance in Ireland. With the threats to humans from ‘Mad Cow’ disease, the devastating effect of ‘Foot and Mouth’ disease, and the more recent scare surrounding Avian Flu, rural iconography has never been more easily de‐romanticised, as holocaust‐like images of major culling were framed against the countryside landscape. (Monahan 2007b, pp. 264–266)

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Figure 13.2  Irish Gothic: Grabbers (2012).

Comedic and parodic use of generic codes can be used for culturally specific purposes as well. During the same years, two ‘zero‐budget’ zombie movies were produced in Northern Ireland that made specific reference to sectarianism and paramilitary violence. Enda Hughes’ The Eliminator (2006) and George Clarke’s Battle of the Bone (2008) both apply the extremes of the genre conventions to ­satirise, not those conventions themselves, or at least not wholly so, but to give a jaundiced view of Northern Ireland’s seemingly intractable sectarian problems. The stream of genre films using Ireland’s Gothic ambiance has continued. Jon Wright’s Grabbers (2012) is set on an offshore island invaded by aliens with an alcohol aversion (Figure  13.2). To survive, the inhabitants need to drink, rather than abstain from, as much alcohol as they can (much as the young girls of Geoffrey Wright’s (2000) comedy horror Cherry Falls need to have sex to avoid a killer targeting only virgins). Ireland, of course, has the locations and creepy houses in ­abundance for ghost stories and other supernatural themes and David Keating’s The Wake Wood (2011), Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal (2014), and Corin Hardy’s The Hallow (2015) make specific use of this Gothic milieu to continue the tradition. The horror films produced in Ireland have offered a broad range of subject matter and themes but the best have managed to adapt the generic conventions to their Irish setting to offer a new take on the genre and, at the same time, approach Irish themes and obsessions from an oblique angle.

Irish Cinema and Authorship Generic criticism has always been seen as the best way to understand the industrial nature of filmmaking, and especially American studio production (‘the genius of the system’ to use Thomas Schatz’s graphic phrase). Within film studies it has



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often been contrasted equally with auteur criticism which, paradoxically, ­downplays the production context (‘despite the system’, in other words). Irish film production has never been a studio‐based system. Rather, the funding mechanisms set in place and the need to go outside for extra funding have meant that production has largely been on a project‐by‐project basis and this in turn has favoured the writer‐ director. From its beginnings in the early 1980s, writer‐directors have dominated Irish state‐funded indigenous cinema. The first feature film to be funded was Angel (1982), written and directed by Neil Jordan. This not only established the career of Ireland’s most celebrated auteur, it also established the pattern of writer‐directors that has endured for over 30 years. According to the Board’s annual report for 2015, for example, of the 38 feature films it supported between 2013 and 2015, 24 of these, or 63%, were films written or co‐written by the director. This is, perhaps, hardly surprising, since the promotion of new indigenous films continues to be a main function of the Film Board and, to achieve this, young directors need to be encouraged and promoted. Given the difficulty young filmmakers have in breaking into the industry at a commercial level, the Board’s strategy is to seed‐fund an infrastructure that helps to train new directors and to give them e­ xperience through various short film‐funding programmes. Indeed, short filmmaking came to be seen as ‘calling cards’ for future feature production and many of the established local auteurs made their way through this route (McLoone 2000, pp. 151–162). The process is artisanal rather than industrial and, operating outside of any recognisable studio system, encourages the growth of writer‐directors (sometimes working with the same producer to constitute a production team). In another sense, though, this predominance of writer‐directors reflects the ­ideology that underpinned the campaign, in North and South, to establish a funded film industry in the first place. The main argument was based on the ‘right to represent ourselves’ in a screen culture that was dominated by outsider images (those traditions of representation so meticulously analysed in academic film studies). It was a small step from the idea of ‘national’ self‐expression to the notion of ‘personal’ self‐expression and so much of indigenous Irish cinema down the years has reflected the personal rather than the generic (even if some of the indigenous auteurs were to express themselves through recognisably genre films). Ireland now maintains what is effectively a three‐level layer of writer‐director‐auteurs. There is always a pool of new young directors who, having emerged in most cases from making short films, have managed to graduate to their first feature and operate at the low‐budget end of the scale. In the middle is a larger number of directors who have established themselves over the years with a number of mid‐budget feature films that have been seen internationally, mainly at festivals, but which have found an ­audience in Ireland through a limited cinematic release and subsequent television screening. Some of these directors, like Paddy Breathnach, Aisling Walshe, John Crowley, Lance Daly, Juanita Wilson, Ken Wardrop, Carmel Winters, and John Carney have a growing international profile and have made bigger‐budget films for the international market. At the top level are those directors like Neil Jordan,

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Jim  Sheridan, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, and most recently, Lenny Abrahamson, who have built genuinely international reputations and who make their films on a larger scale for the international market. These directors inhabit a transnational universe; their films funded through complex international deals, often involving major American or British studios and distributed as high profile, prestigious events. The most critically and commercially successful director continues to be Neil Jordan and his reputation is confirmed by the number of academic studies he has elicited (Rockett and Rockett 2003; Zucker 2008) and by the importance attached to his work in the major surveys of Irish film already discussed. Jordan is the ­personification of transnational filmmaking, having pursued his career in Ireland, Britain, and the USA. He has made nearly 20 feature films as well as a host of shorter segments and television material (acting as writer/producer/director of the TV series The Borgias 2011–2013). He has also developed a characteristic mode of filmmaking by interspersing big‐budget studio films, both British and American, with smaller‐scale, more personal films, usually pursuing an Irish theme through films scripted by himself. His films are imbued with a characteristic sombre identity best described by one of his main collaborators, the actor Stephen Rea, as ‘Jordanland’  –  an imaginative space connected to the common experience in oblique ways (Zucker 2008). In Jordan’s films, reality is always shifting and slipping; identity is always unstable and ambiguous and sexuality is always ambivalent and uncertain. Jordan’s films characteristically are always ‘exploring boundaries’ (Rockett and Rockett 2002) and the world his characters inhabit circulate around recurring themes: storytelling and performance; the quest for identity and wholeness; meditations on innocence; permutations of the family unit, and dark, irrational forces that surround characters suffering psychic and emotional trauma (Zucker 2008). As was noted, Jordan gently parodies Ireland’s Gothic ambience in High Spirits (1988) but he, more than any other Irish director, has worked in the Gothic mode itself. This is clear from his direct engagement with the horror genre: The Company of Wolves (1984), Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Butcher Boy (1997), In Dreams (1999), and Byzantium (2012). However, there is often a Gothic element in his other films – the asylum scene in Angel (1982), the catacombs of neo‐noir Dublin in Michael Collins (1996) or the intimations of the supernatural in Ondine (2009). Many of Jordan’s films are laden as well with references to popular culture generally and one of the themes running through The Butcher Boy is the influence of popular culture on and in Ireland – British and American comics, jazz music, genre cinema and popular television. These clash with markers of a traditional Irish culture: Catholicism in general and the cult of the Virgin Mary in particular, the valorisation of the family unit as the basic unit of society, and the promotion of rural life and its traditional values. The Butcher Boy is his most potent film and his most complex exploration of Irish identity but his other Irish films – Angel, The Miracle (1991), The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Breakfast on Pluto (2005), and Ondine constitute a remarkable body of work that has sustained a multi‐layered interrogation of a changing Ireland.



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If Jordan’s films tend to be exploratory and oblique, Jim Sheridan’s films are more emotional and melodramatic. If Jordan exudes a fine cinematic eye, Sheridan’s strength has been in his ability to draw remarkable performances from his actors; both Daniel Day‐Lewis and Brenda Fricker won acting Oscars for Sheridan’s first film My Left Foot (1989), and Richard Harris was nominated for an award for Sheridan’s second film, The Field (1990). His 1993 film, In the Name of the Father, was nominated in seven categories in the 1994 Academy Awards and, although it failed to win any Oscars, the film did win Best Film in the European awards later that year and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Festival. Similar critical acclaim followed his 2002 film, In America, which received three nominations for the Academy Awards and two for the Golden Globes. The acclaim that Sheridan has drawn, from critics and from audiences, is ­testament to the fact that he has found a way of broaching difficult subject‐matter in a popular idiom. Sheridan’s best films and his most critically acclaimed have been concerned with the Ireland he grew up in and the personal and family issues with which he was familiar. In all of his best films, there is an upbeat message of individuals who triumph over adversity, even if the adversity is graphically realised. His films touch on the politics of Ireland – Ireland of the 1950s in My Left Foot, the 1960s rural Ireland of The Field and the Belfast of the Troubles in In the Name of the Father and The Boxer (1997). As McLoone has argued, although Sheridan obviously has a political sensibility, he does not make overtly political films; rather he approaches complex political situations  –  especially the situation in Northern Ireland – through the human subjects at their centre and provides an uplifting and satisfying conclusion that appeals to popular audiences (McLoone 2000, p. 73). There is also an autobiographical element to Sheridan’s films and, if this is most obvious in the New York – set In America, Sheridan’s own family history, and ­especially his relationship to his own father, are at the heart of his other films. Jordan, Sheridan, and Thaddeus O’Sullivan all broke into international acclaim back in the 1980s/early 1990s and the Irish director who seems most likely to emulate their success is Dublin’s Lenny Abrahamson. His film versions of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2015) and Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2018) have been critically acclaimed internationally confirming his status as the most interesting  –  and the most challenging – of the younger directors. Abrahamson has so far made six feature films, each of which demonstrates a distinctive and self‐contained cinematic style. Adam and Paul (2004) concerns the ­eponymous Dublin drug addicts as they make their way into and through the city of Dublin looking to hustle, through fair means and foul, the necessary funds to buy their fix for the day (Figure 13.3). In its spare and repetitive dialogue and the seemingly endless waiting that the protagonists endure, the film resembles Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the film exudes something of both Beckett’s humanity and his philosophical angst. Adam and Paul are outsiders to the wealth of Celtic Tiger Dublin, two sad, confused, puzzled, and strangely i­nnocent bystanders to the onward march of prosperity. If Beckett is one reference point for Adam and Paul, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a reference for Garage (2007). Again, the

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Figure 13.3  ‘Distinctive and self‐contained’: Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam and Paul (2004).

film features an outsider, Josie, an intellectually slow adult who runs a petrol station in a small town in rural Ireland. Josie watches the world go by until he befriends another loner and begins to realise that life has other attractions and pleasures. His fate is similar to Steinbeck’s Lenny, an innocent who becomes the repository for other people’s neurosis and fears with inevitable tragic results. Abrahamson’s third film about contemporary Celtic Tiger Ireland, What Richard Did (2012), proved to be his most controversial. The focus here is not on the ­outsider to prosperity but to an individual very much at the centre of wealth and privilege. The teenage Richard has everything going for him and enjoys the life of leisure and privilege that goes with those who have prospered in the new Ireland. But is he beyond morality and beyond justice because of his wealth? The film moves almost philosophically around the question of privilege, guilt, and innocence and leaves the audience at the end with a series of ambiguous and ­unanswered questions about the nature of the crime that Richard committed. Thus while Josie in Garage is innocent but found guilty because of his mental slowness, Richard is guilty but is found innocent because of the workings of privilege. Abrahamson’s first feature to operate outside of a distinct Irish milieu Frank (2014) was scripted by rock journalist Jon Ronson and is very loosely based on 1980s pop singer Frank Sidebottom, who performed on stage wearing a large fake head. This is a film about creativity and the relationship between art and commerce and it achieves the remarkable non‐commercial, or anti‐commercial, trick of having one of the world’s most bankable stars, Michael Fassbender, wear a false head for the bulk of the film. Again, this is a strangely philosophical film, like the rest of Abrahamson’s work, and his intellectual cinema, its ability to entertain while pushing its audience into deliberating quite complex issues, are what makes him such an interesting and increasingly acclaimed director.



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Despite the fact that all these directors have worked within and for the i­nternational screen industry, and despite the fact that they have explored themes through a range of cinematic genres, in the end, they have also addressed themselves to concerns that are recognisably local, indigenous, and specific. They, and their films, are national and transnational, generic and personal, grounded and transcendent, all at the same time. In this way, their films reflect the complex way in which Ireland itself exists in relation to wider global economics and culture. The fact that within Irish film studies, it is possible to approach a considerable body of contemporary filmmaking though the filters of both genre and authorship and to place these within a national cinema paradigm (Irish horror, Jordan’s Gothic, the Troubles films of Sheridan) is testament to how far both filmmaking and film studies have developed in a relatively short time.

Conclusion Ireland’s film industry, in North and South, exists through a regime of state‐funding initiatives supported by commercial financing from an increasingly interested international industry. Small‐scale indigenous cinema is made possible through the ­success that agencies on both sides of the border have had in interesting global, especially American, financing, and through the training and facilities that this has provided. In many ways, Ireland is a perfect example of the local in the global, of the national existing within the international and the cinema that it produces resembles these binaries in both their positive and their negative registers. Once an isolated and poverty‐stricken cinematic culture, with few resources and little in the way of infrastructure, Ireland has now joined the world of international image‐making, creating at least a two‐way flow of images where once there existed only an in‐flow from the metropolitan centres. As the controversy over John Michael McDonagh demonstrated, there is still a debate to be had about what this means for indigenous cinema and about the kinds of film that get commissioned and marketed. But at least this debate now takes place in an environment where image‐making is no longer seen as something the ‘visually impaired’ Irish cannot do.

References Addley, Esther. (2014). ‘Game of Thrones brings its magic to Northern Ireland’s economy’. The Guardian (4 April). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/ tv‐and‐radio/2014/apr/04/game‐of‐thrones‐northern‐ireland‐economy‐tourism (accessed 12 November 2014).

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Andrew, Dudley (2006). An atlas of world cinema. In: Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim), 19–29. London: Wallflower Press. Barton, Ruth (ed.) (2004). Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Beaumont‐Thomas, Ben. (2013). ‘Only a small fraction of British films turn a profit, BFI study finds’. The Guardian (3 December). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2013/dec/03/7‐percent‐british‐film‐profit‐bfi‐study (accessed 12 November 2014). Clarke, Donald. (2014). ‘The ticket’. Irish Times (11 April), p. 11. Dennison, Stephanie and Hwee Lim, Song (eds.) (2006). Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. London: Wallflower Press. Duffy, Martin (2003). The business. Film Ireland 95: 32–35. Evoke.ie. (2014). ‘Director of Calvary denies film is Irish…’. Available at: http://www. evoke.ie/showbiz/calvary‐film‐not‐irish. (accessed 12 November 2014). Follows, Stephen. (2013). ‘49 interesting facts about the UK film industry’. Available at: http://stephenfollows.com/49‐interesting‐facts‐about‐uk‐film‐industry (accessed 12 November 2014). Gibbons, Luke (1984). Synge, country and western: the myth of the West in Irish and American culture. In: Culture and Ideology in Ireland (ed. Chris Curtin, Mary Kelly and Liam O’Dowd), 1–19. Galway: Galway University Press. Gledhill, Christine (2007). Genre and nation. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 11–26. London: Routledge. Higbee, Will and Lim, Song Hwee (2010). Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies. Transnational Cinemas 1 (1): 7–21. Higgins, Michael D. (1995). Public interview, National Film Theatre, London, October. Higson, Andrew (2000). The limiting imagination of national cinema. In: Cinema and Nation (ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie), 63–74. London: Routledge. Higson, Andrew (2002). The concept of national cinema. In: Film and Nationalism (ed. Alan Williams), 52–67. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hill, John (1987). Images of violence. In: Cinema and Ireland (Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill), 147–193. London: Croom Helm. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, John (2006). Cinema and Northern Ireland. London: BFI. Hjort, Mette and Petrie, Duncan (2007). The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Irish Film Board. (2013). Annual Report. Galway: IFB. Irish Film Board. (2014). ‘James Hickey welcomes recent debate on Irish film …’. Available at: http://www.irishfilmboard.ie/irish_film_industry/news/?id=2542 (accessed 12 November 2014). Irish Film Board. (2015a). ‘Section  481 cultural test’. Available at: http://www. irishfilmboard.ie/financing_your_film/Section_481_Cultural_Test/29 (accessed 1 November 2015). Irish Film Board. (2015b). ‘Facts and figures’. Available at: http://www.irishfilmboard.ie/ irish_film_industry/Facts_amp_Figures/35 (accessed 1 November 2015). Layden, Dervila (2007). Discovering and uncovering genre in Irish cinema. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 27–44. London: Routledge.



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McDonald, Henry. (2011). ‘Northern Ireland film boom fuelled by Game of Thrones and Belfast punk film’. The Guardian (28 December). Available at: http://www. theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/28/northern‐ireland‐game‐of‐thrones (accessed 12 November 2014). McIlroy, Brian (2007). Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. McLoone, Martin (1994). National cinema and cultural identity: Ireland in Europe. In Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe (ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth), 146–173. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies. McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI. McLoone, Martin (2006). National cinema in Ireland. In: Theorising National Cinema (ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen), 88–100. London: BFI. McLoone, Martin (2007). Cinema, city and imaginative space: “hip hedonism” and recent Irish cinema. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 205–216. London: Routledge. McManus, John. (1994). ‘Tax break breathes new life into film industry’. Irish Times Business Supplement ( July 29), p. 12. Monahan, Barry (2007a). Playing cops and robbers: recent Irish cinema and genre performance. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 45–57. London: Routledge. Monahan, Barry (2007b). Attack of the killer cows! Reading genre and context in Isolation. Estudios Irlandeses 2: 264–266. Northern Ireland Screen (2013). Opening Doors: A Strategy to Transform the Screen Industries in Northern Ireland. Belfast: NI Screen. O’Regan, Nadine. (2014). ‘Artistic licence: the truth always hurts’. Sunday Business Post Agenda (September). O’Toole, Fintan. (1995). ‘Is this what an “Irish” film industry is for?’ The Irish Times (19 September), p. 10. Pettitt, Lance (2000). Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Pettitt, Lance (2004). “We’re not fucking eye‐talians.” The gangster genre and Irish cinema. In: Keeping it Real: Irish Film and Television (ed. Ruth Barton and Harvey O’Brien), 25–38. London: Wallflower Press. Pulver, Andrew. (2012). ‘Will Cameron’s speech on funding only be fit for the box‐office kings?’ The Guardian (11 January). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2012/jan/11/cameron‐speech‐funding‐box‐office (accessed 12 November 2014). Radley, Emma (2013). Violent transpositions: the disturbing “appearance” of the Irish horror film. In: Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts (ed. Claire Bracken and Emma Radley), 109–123. Cork: Cork University Press. Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke, and Hill, John (1987). Cinema and Ireland. London: Croom Helm. Rockett, Emer and Rockett, Kevin (2003). Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries. Dublin: The Liffey Press. Vitali, Valentina and Willemen, Paul (eds.) (2006). Theorising National Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Zucker, Carole (2008). The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival. London: Wallflower Press.

14

Vernacular Visions Ireland and Accented Cinema Luke Gibbons

They have sought to make sense out of the larger culture and its dominant ­traditions by introducing their own accents into the language of visual representation. (Cornell 2002, p. 102) Towards the end of Once ( John Carney, 2006), the two main characters in the story, Guy (Glen Hansard) and Girl (Markéta Irglová), escape from the confines of Dublin’s inner city and head along the coast road to the countryside on a motorcycle. Though they have only known each other for a short time, an attraction has grown between them, but complications have emerged. They park the cycle on Killiney Hill overlooking Dublin Bay, and find their way to a clearing to take in the full extent of the breathtaking view. In film parlance, this constitutes ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’ which became a staple in Hollywood cinema and particularly in the New Realism of British cinema in the 1950s and 1960s (Higson 1984). The long shot overlooking the town provides a romantic interlude for cinematic spectacle and a welcome break from grimy buildings and mean streets, but it also sets the scene for romantic passion, or the kind of heart‐to‐heart conversations that finally clear the air. Guy, in fact, has a lot on his mind, for earlier, Girl, a young Czech immigrant in Dublin, had brought him back to her apartment in Mountjoy Square, where he was surprised to meet not only her mother but also her small child. Though he appears to take it in his stride, how she came to have the child is unresolved, so he bides his time. On the walk up to the cliff, she reveals she is married but estranged from her husband back in the Czech Republic and, as they survey the vista of shore and sea, Guy asks, somewhat tentatively, ‘What is the Czech for “ocean”?’ When Girl answers ‘Oceán’ – ‘pretty much the same’ as English – this prompts the next question, broaching the issue of her feelings for her A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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husband: ‘What is the Czech for “Do you love him?”’ She translates it into Czech but when Guy, phonetically, redirects the question back to her, she replies, with a bemused look: ‘Miluju tebe’. The answer hangs in the air, and when he exclaims ‘What? …. What do you say?’ she smiles and walks away: ‘Come on, let’s go …’ (Figure 14.1). It is difficult to know what Guy makes of this response, but the audience (unless it is Czech) is no wiser. This exchange proves to be a turning point in the film for, at the end, Girl is re‐united with her husband who joins her in Dublin, and Guy is seen walking through Dublin airport on his way to rekindle his relationship with his former girlfriend in London. It would be reasonable to conclude that Girl’s untranslated answer to Guy’s question was that she did indeed love her husband, but (as viewers subsequently found out ‘extra‐textually’ through word of mouth and online blogs) that is not what she actually said: her response was that she loved Guy – in English: ‘It is you I love’. Love is declared but it is not communicated. Instead of the truth coming out – in keeping with the long shot overlooking the town – a crucial element in the story is withheld not only from a character, or even viewers, but also from the narrative itself, as it proceeds seemingly oblivious to its own unrealised logic (or desire). While the film maintained this aesthetic reticence, the live musical version that opened on Broadway in 2012 to considerable acclaim (winning eight Tony awards) acted otherwise.1 Through an imaginative set design, the couple ascends to a position above the stage to simulate Killiney Hill, at which point the stage below is darkened except for a sprinkling of lights to give the impression of a distant city at night. When the same exchange recurs in Czech, however, the audience is not left in the dark, for neon subtitles akin to a scrolling Times Square tickertape light up, spelling out the translation for all to see.

Figure 14.1  ‘Cross‐cultural encounter’: Once (2006).

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The gap or blind‐spot in Carney’s film is not a purely formal or textual effect, as in the ‘puzzle film’ genre, but is culturally specific, turning (in this case) on the ­different repertoires and linguistic competence audiences bring to a film. But there is more to it than this, for the aspects of the story lost in translation (or lack of translation) are akin to certain deficits that may occur in cross‐cultural encounters, and particularly in cinema, notwithstanding its early claims to afford a new ‘Esperanto’ of the eye (Hansen 1991). In much Irish film, we find what Hamid Naficy (2001) has termed an ‘accented cinema’, a set of film discourses and practices attuned to the idioms and nuances of a culture, but which often escape the casual or indifferent eye. (Though Naficy’s main concern is with diasporic and ‘extranational’ cinema, his project ‘to put the locatedness and the historicity’ back into film is equally relevant to national cinemas, particularly in postcolonial ­societies subject to de‐territorialisation at home).2 Explaining his use of the term ‘accented’, Naficy shifts the debate on cultural specificity from issues of content or representation – what is depicted – to modes of enunciation: voice, style, tone, and conditions of enunciation. Drawing on its original linguistic usage, accent points to ‘those features of pronunciation which identify where a person is from, regionally and socially’ (Naficy 2001, pp. 22–23): it may not constitute the substance of communication but that which ‘makes a particular word or syllable stand out in a stream of speech’ (Naficy 2001, p. 23). Accent need not be consciously assumed or staged (though of course it can be): it is often most ‘pronounced’ when it is least self‐conscious, as in the give‐away traces in Count Dracula’s mastery of English, frustrating his designs to conceal his origins in London. As in the case of Count Dracula, moreover, who carried his home soil with him, accent is compared by Naficy to linguistic shifters ‘such as “I” and “you”, whose reference can be understood only in the context of the utterance’ (Naficy 2001, p. 32: italics added). Accent in this sense is closer to accentuate, the stress placed on certain words: hence, according to V.N. Volosinov, the kind of intonation in an utterance that cannot be understood without a grasp of context and situation (Volosinov 1988). As Roland Barthes notes, meaning in these circumstances may often be ‘obtuse’, at odds with the overt content of a message: ‘[o]btuse meaning can be seen as an accent, the very form of an emergence, of a fold (a crease even) marking the heavy layer of informations and signification’ (Barthes 1977, p. 62). These elements may be oblique but in acknowledging situation or location, they counter attempts, in Barthes’ phrase, to ‘de‐originat[e] the utterance’ – that is, ‘the removal or suppression of … something produced out of a locatable, historical, determined position into something natural to the world’ (Naficy 2001, p. 34).3 The ‘invisible style’ of Hollywood’s universalism constitutes such a set of natural effects: whether in masking its own cultural codings, or in its portrayal of other cultures, context is subsumed into a universal mode of address, giving ‘the impression of cohesiveness of time, space, and causality’ in the self‐contained world of the story (Naficy 2001, p. 34). This is the film style, noted by André Gaudreault, that seems to narrate itself: in accented cinema, by contrast, sites of enunciation literally take place,



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location itself acting as a lens through which the world is viewed.4 As Daniell Cornell writes of similar stylistic inflections that introduce diversity in American painting, notwithstanding its often generic traits: [A] visual accent injects a noticeable, striking, or even startling emphasis into an otherwise unremarkable context … These accents highlight the disparate cultural contexts that often go unnoticed or are ignored in the larger more monolithic national narrative. (Cornell 2002, p. 8)

‘Accent’ thus extends beyond the acoustic to take in vernacular forms, as in the modernist technique of ‘free indirect style’ that recreates the effects of intonation in written or visual form – ‘free indirect discourse’ in literature or, more radically, the ‘free indirect image’ in film championed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and theorised later by Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1986; Pasolini 2005). In free indirect discourse, two or more voices co‐exist in the one utterance, a device exploited in Irish modernism to allow vernacular idioms to intrude on (or usurp) third‐person narration. As Deleuze describes the reworking of this in terms of the bifocal image, ‘the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world: it imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected’ (Deleuze 1986, p. 74). Conversely, a related process allows subjective or cultural inflections to add visual intonations, giving the image ‘a look’ or style that colours it from ‘within’. Drawing on Pasolini, Deleuze notes: ‘It is a matter of style, of ­stylistics, Pasolini says. And Pasolini adds a valuable comment: the richer a language in dialects, the more it allows free indirect discourse to flourish’ (Deleuze 1986, 73; italics added).5 Though considered as a formal technique, free indirect style cannot always be identified in formal (i.e. grammatical) terms, and, in its vernacular expressions, is highly context‐dependent. To know there is another voice in an utterance, it may be necessary to go ‘outside’ the text – to context, or to the wider speech community. In the literary modernism of Joyce, Beckett, or Flann O’Brien – or, more recently, Patrick McCabe, Roddy Doyle, or Eimear McBride – it is often unclear if another voice is present, or whose voice is speaking, as in one of Beckett’s late works, seemingly abstracted from its surroundings: Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply, someone answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there’s a simple answer. It’s not with thinking he’ll find me, but what is he to do living and bewildered, yes living, say what he may. (Beckett 1984, p. 82)

Who is the ‘I’, the ‘he’, or the ‘stranger’ here? More to the point, is there not also a culture speaking through the idiomatic ‘It’s not with thinking he’ll find me’,

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that  could have come straight from Hiberno‐English (or from J.M. Synge)?6 The point is not to locate Beckett so much as his readers: as Ann Beer (1996, pp. 218–219) notes, whatever about his own repudiation of place, ‘there can be no neutral reading’ of Beckett, and readers bring as much to the work as they take from it.7 In Beckett’s Film, as Colin Gardner notes, a similar ‘pronounced’ effect is achieved in visual terms by ‘a Free Indirect discourse which is able to express characters’ inner states via the mise‐en‐scène, while the character is also present within the mise‐en‐scène’ (Gardner 2012, p. 50). At stake here are the limits of translation: in free indirect style, the cadences of the voices refuse the single transferable note. It is no coincidence that the breakdown of communication (one of many) in Once occurs in a scenic landscape, a site of visual pleasure that might be expected to act as common ground, bridging differences, soothing conflict or healing wounds (hence the reconciling role of the long shot overlooking the town, or related uses of Nature, in conflict‐driven narratives). The transcendental appeal of Nature was a source of its therapeutic powers in the Romantic imagination, as in William Wordsworth’s repeated testimony to its healing effects, but in societies with a colonial history, there are few such comfort zones. Instead of mute power, Nature is already spoken for, carrying its own invisible scars: in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘Each layer they strip/Seems camped on before/ ….The wet centre is bottomless’ (Heaney 1969, p. 69). Romantic retreats to nature thus have a tendency to open rather than close wounds, as in successive films about Belfast that feature scenes from Cavehill, associated with insurrectionary memories of the 1798 rebellion, and of ancient Gaelic Ireland. When characters in film have recourse to this promontory overlooking the city to escape the Troubles or their aftermath, as in Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1980), the acclaimed television thriller Harry’s Game (1982) or The Shore (Terry George, 2013), it invariably gives rise to home truths or buried pasts, rather than emotions recollected in tranquillity. In the BBC television drama The Fall (2013–2014), a crime thriller tinged with after‐effects of the Troubles, the rural retreat of the serial killer Paul Spector ( Jamie Dornan) is set in the m ­ ountains overlooking Belfast but it turns out to be not so much a haven of tranquillity but a murder site, the scene of the killer’s successive operations. The night ‘view from the hill overlooking the town’ is repeated in 71 (Yann  Demange, 2014), set during the height of the Troubles following the introduction of internment in 1971, but here urban sites in Sheffield, Blackburn, and Liverpool double up as Belfast locations, including a simulation of shots over the prow of Cavehill. This is in keeping with the ethos of the film according to which, in the words of one of the British army instructors shown in the story, young squaddies do not have to ‘leave their country’ to fight in Belfast. The reality, however, is otherwise: though a brief sighting of a Harland and Wolff crane is afforded in a thunderstorm scene through special effects, the topography is as foreign to the disoriented soldiers on the aptly‐named ‘Kashmir Road’ in Belfast, as if they found themselves in the original far‐flung corner of empire



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in India. ‘It is set in Belfast in 1971’, writes Camilla Long (2014), ‘but really it might be anywhere – Sarajevo in the 1990s or Homs in the present day.’ If, as P. Adams Sitney has suggested, mainstream cinema is attracted to ‘lavish’ scenery and the ‘cinematic picturesque in its most nagging form’, it is not surprising that landscape is reduced to a backdrop, lacking any significance by itself (Sitney 1995, p. 104). In its visual idioms, by contrast, Irish landscape contests both figure and ground and, one is tempted to say, the scenic effects of landscape itself, as in Jack Yeats’ depictions of the Irish (most notably the Sligo) countryside. As Thomas McGreevy observes (in a passage that drew Samuel Beckett’s approval), landscape in Yeats’ paintings is not ‘a mere background to his human figures and human scenes’: With Jack Yeats, the landscape is as real as the figures. It has its own character as they have theirs. It is impersonal. They are the reverse. But the sense of the impersonal is an enrichment of the personal, a new element added to the humanity of the figures. And conversely, the opposition heightens the sense of the impersonal character of the landscape. (McGreevy 1945, p. 13)

In a similar manner, landscape in Irish cinema often bears the weight of the unspoken, or relays oppositional voices at odds with the main drive of the narrative. Calvary ( John Michael McDonagh, 2014) opens with a version of the withholding already found in Once: this time the truth hits home to the central character, Fr James Lavelle (Brendan Glesson), but while the priest knows the inside story, that crucial information is denied to other characters or viewers. The rest of the film is like an Agatha Christie whodunnit scripted by Dostoyevsky or Kaf ka, the plot offering one false lead after another until the final reckoning. The film raises searching questions about good and evil, innocence and guilt, but uses irony and black humour to cut across the more edifying, redemptive moral of the story. As the action unfolds, innocence itself is thrown into doubt, as questions are raised about an all‐loving God who allows evil to prosper, in the person of the ­cannibal killer Freddie Joyce (Domhnall Gleeson) – ‘God made me, didn’t he?’ – and yet who allows good people to die, as in the tragedy of the French doctor killed in a traffic accident, whose forgiving widow, Teresa (Marie‐Josée Croze), sets an example to Father James. As Father James seeks to come to terms with his fate, the imposing beauty of the mountain Ben Bulben looms large over the Sligo countryside (Figure 14.2). Appreciative responses to the Sligo landscape recurred in the critical reception of the film: The film is marked by its use of location. Shot in Sligo, both [John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson] are keen to emphasize how the film flourished under Ben Bulben’s deep shadow. ‘The locations are very important, you know, Galway was very important on The Guard and Sligo was very important on this one’, says McDonagh. ‘It has a real bearing on how everybody interacts’, elaborates Gleeson,

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Figure 14.2  ‘Under Ben Bulben’s shadow’: Calvary (2014). ‘and just the way people carry themselves. It’s only working when you feel part of the place. And you can see that in the film – you really can …. it has a huge impact on the film – the whole Ben Bulben thing in this, it’s so iconic.’ (Buttimer 2014)

Undoubtedly, the natural beauty of the landscape contributes to the appeal of the film, one aerial shot moving slowly over the prow of the mountain to provide, however briefly, a glimpse of the long shot overlooking the town. But if Ben Bulben casts its ‘deep shadow’, the poetry of W.B. Yeats is not far behind and critics were also not slow to pick up on the Yeatsian resonances in the film. Writing in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane (2014) observed that [a]s aerial shots make clear, the countryside is fierce and green, with the Atlantic breaking the teeth of the coast, and a huge stone mass, like a giant’s vaulting horse, overhanging the land. That is Ben Bulben, enshrined by Yeats in verse, and it dwarfs all those dwelling below, save Father James, who strides around in his black soutane, with a beard of russet and grey.

Lane brings W.B. Yeats’ own words to bear on the film: ‘Even the wisest man grows tense/With some sort of violence’, Yeats wrote, in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, and that includes the man of God. At one point, Father James gets hold of a pistol, as if planning a shootout, only to hurl it unused into the waves. (Lane 2014)

Writing of the free indirect image in cinema, Pasolini noted that ‘the insistence on particulars, especially on certain details of the digression, is a deviation in relation to the method of the film: it is the temptation to make another film’ (Pasolini 2005,



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p. 108). ‘The temptation to make another film’ in Calvary is evident in the casting of Ben Bulben as an accusing eye or super‐ego in the background, bringing W.B. Yeats’ own struggles with guilt and responsibility to bear on the story.8 One of the abiding themes in Yeats’ poetry is that history can modify the moral tenor of an action  –  ‘the innocent and the beautiful/Have no enemy but time’ (‘In  Memory of Eve Gore‐Booth and Con Markievicz’)  –  and these sentiments were famously echoed in one of his later poems: ‘Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?’ (‘The Man and the Echo’). In an image evocative of the final scene in Calvary, Yeats wrote that ‘The blood‐dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned’ (‘The Second Coming’: italics added). Commenting on the textuality of landscape during the Literary Revival, Geraldine Higgins writes that ‘Revivalists aimed to make the mute testament of landscape speak out on behalf of a heroic Irish past’ (Higgins 2012, p. 28) but, as Yeats noted in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, it was more likely to exhume ghosts than to inter them: ‘Though grave‐diggers’ toil is long/Sharp their spades, their muscles strong/They but thrust their buried men/Back in the human mind again.’ Early in the film, Fr James walks on the windswept beach where he will meet his fate, and sees his young mass‐server, Micheál (Mícheál Óg Lane), drawing the landscape on a small easel. As Fr James approaches the boy, framed by Ben Bulben, he notices two mysterious figures in the sketch not present on the scene before them. ‘Who are these two lads?’ Fr James asks. ‘Don’t know’, the boy answers, shrugging his shoulders: ‘I’ve been reading these ghost stories. Maybe it has got something to do with that? It’s spooky.’ Fr James looks away as if from an apparition of a death foretold. Among the ghosts was the legendary hero of the Fenian cycle, Diarmuid, who eloped with Fionn Mac Cumhnaill’s beloved Gráinne, and was left to die by Fionn on the side of Ben Bulben. At one point in Calvary, Fr James and his daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) rest at the Split‐Rock in Easkey, Co. Sligo, allegedly thrown by Fionn MacCumhnaill during his quest for the fugitive lovers. It is of course open to debate how much these encryptions inform the multiple layers of meaning at work in the film, but it is striking that similar questions arise in relation to the ‘cinema of poetry’ envisaged by Pasolini and his contemporaries in post‐Second World War Italian cinema. It was indeed another mythic throwing of rocks – this time the faraglioni thrown by the Cyclops into the sea at Aci Trezza off the east coast of Sicily – that constituted the framing landscape of Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948). Though the rocks are not specifically mentioned as Cyclopian in the screenplay (‘the boats are seen passing the two great rocks guarding the little port’), Visconti did acknowledge that part of his attraction to the famous novel on which the film was based, Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881), was ‘that Verga’s Sicily appeared truly as the island of Ulysses … That is how I thought of a film on I Malavoglia’ (quoted in Steimatsky 2008, p. 102). The Homeric allusions are not entirely unmarked, however, as in an ironical take on the plot, a co‐op with the sign ‘Cyclops Company  –  Transportation and Sale of Fish’ ends up governing the lives of the ­traditional fishermen in the small village community. But even without this overt reference, the intonation of the image already spells doom for a traditional way of life.

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‘The ancient accents of the mise‐en‐scène’, writes Joseph Luzzi, ‘find further ­expression in the Homeric landscape bounded by the omnipresent faraglioni, the legendary rocks that separate Aci Trezza from the modern world.’ By remaining visually fixed in the domain of legend, ‘the past is thus pitted against a modern world that can only swallow it up’ (Luzzi 2014, p. 41: first italics added). It is in this sense, as Noa Steimatsky suggests, that landscape may adopts a ‘choral’ role in the narrative: in terms that could apply to Irish accented cinema, he writes: ‘its forms, its proclivity, its prospects are made to appear as if they themselves direct the camera’s framing and movement, its passage from one tableau to another’ (Steimatsky 2008, p. 111). Landscape in cinema is often depicted as a site of projection – an outer expression of the emotions of characters.9 In this aesthetic, which draws on both Romanticism and Expressionism, the environment is subordinate to inner life but, in accented cinema, the landscape, as it were, looks back, subjecting the individual to its f­ ormative influence. Hence in Pasolini’s own cinematic practice, as Naomi Greene notes: The insistences of his lingering and fragmenting camera constantly endow objects and faces with a heightened reality, a symbolic cast. His repeated shots of rocky and volcanic deserts, for example, appear impelled by a desire to wrench secrets from nature’s most inanimate and unyielding face. (Greene 1990, p. 121)

The visual equivalent of the limits of translation in language is thus whether a film could be ‘translated’ to another setting without remainder, and this clearly would not have been possible with Calvary. The reverse situation of a film originally designated for another location that ended up being shot in Ireland also raises questions about the local inflections given to an ‘international’ film. Nothing Personal (2009), a Dutch film by the Polish director Urszula Antoniak, was written with the bleak landscape of the Zuider Zee in mind but on a visit to Connemara, Antoniak came across an isolated cottage on the coast, owned originally as a hunting lodge by Sir William Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s father. She decided to transpose the entire production to this setting, resulting in a film with uncanny resemblances to Once: a cross‐cultural encounter in which a separated woman, Anne (Lote Verbeck), from mainland Europe comes to Ireland and meets a lonely Irish male, Martin (Stephen Rea). The story begins with Anne leaving a damaged relationship in the Netherlands and travelling to Ireland to recuperate in the mountain fastnesses of Connemara. Cut off from human contact, she (like the director) comes across Martin’s secluded cottage in the wilderness and is – tentatively – invited by Martin to stay, on the understanding that nothing will pass between them – not even information about who they are, or their pasts. Accordingly, Anne (as with Girl in Once) does not give her name – ‘You’ appears on the credits – but, unlike Guy, Martin’s gifts do not lie in performance, so much so that one of the punishments for breaching the ‘no questions asked’ pact is that he will be required to sing, preferably a country and western number. As in Once, music turns out in the end to be a saving grace for the turning point is a visit to the local pub where the morose Anne is carried away by an Irish music session, and ends up dancing with Martin.



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One of the most intriguing aspects of Antoniak’s spare exercise in breakdown and anonymity is the desire to know, particularly about secrets and unspoken pasts. At one stage, Martin leaves the cottage for a few days but, unknown to Anne, travels to Amsterdam to visit her old apartment, where he finds a tiny coat‐pin lost between the floorboards. His guest, the visitor to Ireland, is not an isolated individual but must be understood in terms of her own cultural past, however dislocated. In the meantime, Anne searches the house in Martin’s absence to find out more about him and discovers old war medals, suggesting some kind of violent past. Later, Martin’s surreptitious placing of the coat‐pin in Anne’s hand during a moment of minimal physical contact brings together not only two strangers but two sundered pasts. It is crucial, though, that knowledge does not come first in the relationship but is ­preceded by contact: both personally and cross‐culturally, two individuals are drawn together with very little by way of information before they get to know  –  and trust – one another. A similar impulse drives the growing attachment between Guy and Girl in Once, signalled in the opening lines of the Oscar‐winning theme song: ‘I  don’t know you/But I love you/All the more for that …’. Personal knowledge – ­knowing someone as against knowing about them – is hard won in Once, and the most ­intimate communications take place on the streets, in public places, or through song, whereas conversations at close quarters – in Guy’s bedroom, or Girl’s apartment – lead to misunderstanding, or forcing the pace of the relationship. This affective knowledge underscores one of the tendencies of accented cinema: access to certain kinds of experience can only be acquired through contact or participation – or, where cultures are concerned, through awareness of context, location, or social position. This represents a departure from the ‘third party’ stance of naïve universalism, for it is primarily by virtue of its particularism that the free indirect image contests a transcendental style free from all subjective or idiomatic inflections. As Pasolini notes of the politics of vision, specifically with postcolonial societies in mind: [T]he gaze of a peasant, perhaps of an entire town or region in prehistoric conditions of underdevelopment, embraces another type of reality than the gaze given to that same reality by an educated bourgeois. Not only do the two actually see different sets of things, but even a single thing in itself appears different through the two different gazes. (Pasolini 2005, p. 177)

Writing on the politics of landscape, John Agnew notes that while place tends to be associated with locality and tradition, space is represented as global and modern: ‘From one perspective, place is therefore nostalgic, regressive or even reactionary, and space is progressive and radical’: Place is a setting for social rootedness and landscape continuity. Space represents the transcending of the past by overcoming the rootedness of social relations and landscape in place. Not surprisingly, from this understanding those on the political Left will tend to hope that space does trump place, in the hope of a less unequal and more secular world.

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Yet, Agnew goes on to sound a critical note: ‘each of these attributions is m ­ istaken. Neither term has an inherent political association.’ Place may be ‘championed by nationalists, conservatives’ and others, but it ‘is being lost to an increasingly homogeneous and alienating sameness’, which hardly provides a vision of a better future (Agnew 2005, pp. 82–83). In the free indirect image of accented cinema, we see a means of bringing space and place, the universal and the local, inside and outside, into dialogue, attuned to the losses as well as the overlaps between different visual registers. Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1971) is among the group of films singled out for criticism by P. Adams Sitney on account of its excessive spectacle, and it is easy to see why: not only was a considerable poetic licence taken with place (some of the ‘Kerry’ beach scenes were shot in South Africa), but also the strained h ­ armony between nature and emotions stretched even the hackneyed device of ‘pathetic fallacy’ to its limits. No film could be further removed from dense negotiation of landscape in Calvary than Ryan’s Daughter, and yet John Michael McDonagh, the director of Calvary, cites the ‘beautiful scenes all the way through’ of Lean’s epic as an influence on his film.10 This may provide an insight into McDonagh’s much‐publicised concern to distance himself from ‘parochial’ Irish film‐making, and to identify his work with the ‘universal themes’ he ascribes to Calvary.11 But it is precisely this dual vision that accented cinema addresses: many viewers may value Calvary for its breath‐ taking scenery at a Ryan’s Daughter level without attending to its nuanced, formal engagements with conscience, landscape, and memory, but both approaches (and no doubt many more) may achieve articulation within its fields of vision. Writing on ‘inner speech’ in cinema, Paul Willemen notes that internal resonances may co‐exist with external modes, or ‘within’ more general forms, without the translation of one into the other: It should be stressed that this does not mean it is impossible to read a text which was composed within the domain of another language, as the code of internal speech is only one of the many codes at work in the text, the vast majority of which are cross‐cultural. But this presence of internal speech … nevertheless deals a serious blow to any notion of cinema as one universal language. (Willemen 1974, p. 66)

Nor does it follow that natives alone have access to ‘inner speech’: in Once, as we have seen, it is Girl who has the last word on Killiney Hill, the free indirect image drawing on a culture in which, as James Joyce remarked, language itself is at once ‘so familiar and foreign’ ( Joyce 1992, p. 205).

Notes 1 The musical Once, adapted for the stage by playwright Enda Walsh, opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, New York, March 2012.



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2 As Naficy notes: ‘Despite the recent overcelebration of the extranational and extraterritorial … many accented films emphasize territoriality, rootedness, and geography. Because they are deterritorialized, these films are deeply concerned with territory and territoriality’ (Naficy 2001, p. 5). 3 Barthes’ phrase was originally cited in Krauss (1980, p. 190). The second part of the quotation is from John Caughie’s linking of film ‘discourse’ to Emile Benveniste’s concept of enunciation (Caughie 1981, pp. 202–203). 4 Gaudreault, writing of dominant narrative forms in film and on the stage, is drawing here on Emile Benveniste: ‘No one speaks here: the events seem to narrate themselves’ (Gaudreault 2009, p. 58). 5 In ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, Pasolini’s discussion of free indirect style concerns itself with the presence of a director’s voice/vision in a character’s point of view but in the essay ‘Comments on Free Indirect Discourse’, he elaborates ‘that every time one has Free Indirect this implies a sociological consciousness’ and instances among low registers ‘imitations of sublinguistic or dialectal speech, vernacular poetry, etc.’ (Pasolini 2005, pp. 82, 85). 6 For Beckett’s use of Synge and Hiberno‐English clauses beginning with ‘It is’ and ‘It’s’, see Dolan (1984). 7 Beer adds that while preparing Krapp’s Last Tape for a production in Ireland, Beckett saw fit to change the more general ‘Connaught’ to the more precise ‘Kerry’, as if Irish audiences would appreciate the difference (Beer 1996, p. 219). 8 The classic formulation of the mountain as ‘superego’ is in the stolen boat episode of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. When the boy steals the boat, ‘it was an act of stealth/ And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice/ Of mountain‐echoes did my boat move on’. But then on the lake, ‘a huge peak, black and huge,/As if with voluntary power instinct/ Upreared its head’ and forced the boy to turn back out of guilt, and to return the boat. The peak is subsequently internalised, as a mountain of the mind: ‘huge and mighty forms, that do not live/ Like living men, moved slowly through the mind/ By day, and were a trouble to my dreams’ (Wordsworth 1954, pp. 94–95). See also Thomas Weiskel’s psychoanalytic reading of this episode (Weiskel 1986, pp. 101–102). 9 As Higson points out, the tendency of ‘That Long Shot of Our Town From That Hill’ (a term he derives from John Krish) in British films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) is ‘to psychologise rather than historicise the space, to marshal it into a representation of a state of mind’ (Higson 1984, p. 8). 10 Speaking about Ireland’s landscape, McDonagh tells how Ryan’s Daughter ‘was a big influence on this and The Guard – ‘the way it’s shot; just beautiful scenes all the way through, scenes that showed how you could shoot Ireland’. He further muses, ‘With Calvary, if you look at all the scenery, you wonder why hasn’t an Irish film been shot there before?” (Buttimer 2014). 11 See the article in the Irish Times entitled ‘Director of The Guard says Irish Films are not “intelligent”’ (Clarke 2014). It is perhaps with situations like this in mind that André Gaudreault (2009, p. 69) notes the importance of identifying a ‘“point of view” from which the action [in a film] is presented – a point of view that will often not necessarily correspond with the point of view the original author may have inscribed in his or her text’.

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References Agnew, John (2005). Space: place. In: Spaces of Geographical Thought: Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries (ed. Paul Cloke and Ron Johnston), 81–96. London: Sage. Barthes, Roland (1977). The third meaning. In: Image Music Text (trans. (ed. Stephen Heath), 52–68. London: Fontana. Beckett, Samuel (1984). Texts for nothing 4. In: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1980 (ed. Samuel Beckett). London: John Calder. Beer, Ann (1996). Beckett’s bilingualism. In: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (ed. John Pilling), 209–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buttimer, Lorna. (2014). ‘Interview: Brendan Gleeson and John Michael McDonagh. “Calvary”’. Film Ireland (11 April). Available at: http://filmireland.net/2014/04/11/ interview‐brendan‐gleeson‐and‐john‐michael‐mcdonagh‐calvary (accessed 29 June 2016). Caughie, John (ed.) (1981). Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: BFI/Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clarke, Donald. (2014). ‘Director of The Guard says Irish films are not “intelligent”’. Irish Times (15 September). Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/ director‐of‐the‐guard‐says‐irish‐films‐are‐not‐intelligent‐1.1929362 (accessed 29 June 2016). Cornell, Daniell (2002). American Accents: Visual Culture as History. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam)). London: Athlone Press. Dolan, Terence P (1984). Samuel Beckett’s dramatic use of Hiberno‐English. Irish University Review 14 (1): 46–56. Gardner, Colin (2012). Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaudreault, André (2009). From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (trans. Timothy Bernard). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Greene, Naomi (1990). Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hansen, Miriam (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heaney, Seamus (1969). Bogland. In: Door Into the Dark (Seamus Heaney). London: Faber and Faber. Higgins, Geraldine (2012). Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Higson, Andrew (1984). Space, place, spectacle: landscape and townscape in the “kitchen sink” film. Screen 25 (4–5): 2–21. Joyce, James (1992 [1916]). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin. Krauss, Rosalind (1980). Poststructuralism and the paraliterary. October 13: 36–40. Lane, Anthony. (2014). ‘Big Men: “Calvary” and “A Master Builder”’. New Yorker (4  August). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/ big‐men‐2 (accessed 29 June 2016). Long, Camilla. (2014). ‘Effing and grinding’. Sunday Times (12 October). Luzzi, Joseph (2014). The Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.



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McGreevy, Thomas (1945). Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation. Dublin: Victor Waddington. Naficy, Hamid (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo (2005). Heretical Empiricism (trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K Barnett)). Washington, DC: New Academia. Sitney, P Adams (1995). Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera. In: Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts (ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell), 103–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steimatsky, Noa (2008). Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Volosinov, V.N. (1988). Discourse in life and discourse in poetry: questions of sociological poetics. In: Bakhtin School Papers (ed. Ann Shukman), 10–17. Oxford: RPT Publications. Weiskel, Thomas (1986). The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Willemen, Paul (1974). Reflections on Eikhenbaum’s concept of internal speech in the cinema. Screen 15 (4): 59–70. Wordsworth, William (1954). Selections from The Prelude. In: Wordsworth: A Selection (ed. W.E. Williams), 94–95. London: Penguin.

Part III

Critical Approaches Debating Film Contexts

15

British Film Industry and Policy Issues and Debates Duncan Petrie

Introduction In considering the development of the British film industry and how it has been conceptualised and debated over the years, one is immediately struck by an extraordinary sense of déjà vu. The history of the industry – or certainly its production sector  –  repeatedly assumes the form of a narrative in which the same issues, opportunities, strategies, and problems seem to recur, over and over again, regardless of the historical moment or underlying purpose of particular accounts and commentaries. Thus, a sober report on the industry prepared by the policy think tank, Political and Economic Planning in 1952 highlighted: The crisis in British film‐making  –  where lies the main problem of the industry – started long ago, and only at rare intervals during the past forty years have there been short periods of prosperity to lighten an otherwise depressing canvas. Of a stable production industry there has been no sign. (Political and Economic Planning 1952, p. 11)

While half a century later the polemical journalist Alexander Walker concluded his three‐volume account of the industry from 1959 to the millennium with the following assessment: Essentially the British film industry was in the same state that it had always been – or at least for the last forty years. The switchback of (occasionally extreme, though much more frequently qualified) success and that of abysmal failure. The exhilaration of boom, then the all too common reality of bust … The pity is that by the year 2000 there was no sign at all that anything would change. (Walker 2004, p. 309) A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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For some commentators, this instability is a direct consequence of the particular way in which the industry has been constituted. Nick Roddick, for example, argues that there are only two viable models of filmmaking: the Hollywood studio model and the European subsidised model, underpinned by a commercial and a cultural imperative respectively  –  and being ‘(n)either Hollywood‐style nor state‐supported, the British film industry has always fallen more or less disastrously between these two stools’ (Roddick 1985, p. 4). But the key point is that the industry has been continually and consistently posed as a problem. The fluctuating fortunes of British film production feature prominently in many of the standard histories, with the predominant narrative established in the 1930s when, following the commercial success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Alexander Korda embarked on an ambitious production programme of big‐ budget, high‐quality British films for the international market (Kulik 1975). Korda’s strategy included the construction of a modern studio complex at Denham and the establishment of a British Technicolor laboratory. But the venture proved to be a spectacular business failure and by 1939 Korda was forced to retrench and sell his studio to J. Arthur Rank. This pattern of optimistic expansion followed by rapid retrenchment become a familiar one, subsequently repeated by Rank in the late 1940s (Murphy 1983b, Macnab 1993), EMI in the 1970s (Walker 1985), Goldcrest in the 1980s (Eberts and Illott 1990), Polygram in the 1990s (Kuhn 2002), and FilmFour in the 2000s (Walker 2004). Existing alongside the desire to make British films for an international market – a clear imitation of Hollywood – has been an alternative business strategy rooted in the production of modestly‐budgeted, indigenous films aimed primarily at a national audience. This tradition is perhaps most closely associated with the operation of producers Ted Black at Gainsborough in the 1940s (Murphy 1983a) and Michael Balcon at Ealing studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Ellis 1975; Porter 1983), but it equally applied to ABPC at Elstree in the 1950s (Porter 2001), the ‘Carry On’ cycle of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the initial 1980s version of ‘Film on Four’, prior to a subsequent focus on international markets (Pym 2002). While the tension between these two production strategies has been another defining characteristic of how the industry’s history has been conceptualised, the former has generated the dominant narrative. The cycle of boom and bust is often related to three closely‐related recurring problems, namely, ‘the dominant influence of America; the monopoly exercised by the major British interests; and the lack of a stable domestic production industry’ (Dickinson 1983, p. 74). The overwhelming popularity of American motion ­pictures among British audiences had been established by the teens and has prevailed to the present day. One fundamental and far‐reaching consequence of this domination has been to drive a wedge between the business interests of British exhibitors and distributors – who could rely on the popularity of imported product to ensure profitability – and producers – who faced a difficult struggle to compete with the higher budgets, production values, star appeal (and even sometimes more favourable trading terms) offered by the Hollywood product.



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One response was the attempt to emulate the US business model of vertical integration through the creation of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation and the Associated British Picture Corporation by the early 1930s. Both combines were subsequently subject to corporate takeover  –  GBPC was acquired by the Rank Organisation in 1941, while ABPC was bought by EMI in 1969 – but ‘the duopoly’ ostensibly dominated the industry until the 1980s. But while vertical integration did provide greater stability for British production in the 1930s and 1940s, the model proved ill‐equipped to deal with the subsequent decline in cinema attendances and growth in independent production that began in the 1950s onwards. The result was even greater internal fragmentation as the majors concentrated on the more profitable distribution and exhibition sectors of their business  –  fed mainly by Hollywood imports – leaving producers to bear the brunt of economic uncertainty. This underlying structural weakness has in turn underlined another key feature of how the British film industry has been presented and analysed, namely, the role of government intervention and the significance of film policy. The standard account here is that from the 1920s onwards the state has attempted to address the problems of a ‘beleaguered industry’ by providing a variety of protective measures to help achieve the holy grail of ‘sustainability’. The predominance of the narrative of crisis noted above suggests that the efficacy of such attempts has been limited at best.

Pioneering Scholarship on the British Film Industry The focus of this chapter is on how the history of the British film industry has been conceived, framed, and discussed, making it primarily a history of debates rather than yet another attempt to sketch the contours of the history of the industry. Significant contributions to the field have been produced by a range of commentators  –  scholars, journalists, policy‐makers and industry insiders  – motivated by a variety of purposes and agendas and drawing on different kinds of knowledge, understanding and experience. Serious consideration of the organisation and operation of the industry tended to be confined to specialist trade journals such as Kine Weekly and The Bioscope prior to the appearance of more substantial analyses in the 1930s. A notable pioneering effort here is the comprehensive statistical survey of the exhibition and distribution sectors conducted in 1934 by Simon Rowson, who was also an experienced distributor (Rowson 1936). Even more significant is the 1937 report, Money Behind the Screen, by the Marxist art historian F.D. Klingender and the documentary filmmaker Stuart Legg. This provided the first detailed exposé of power relations in the industry which raised concerns about domination by a small group of rich financiers, the substantial inroads made into the industry by Hollywood, and the boom in rashly speculative production financing. The report’s successful prediction of one of the first manifestations of boom turning to bust established a

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critical perspective that would inform subsequent analyses, regardless of their political or intellectual predispositions. These include the 1952 report by the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), published at a moment when cinema attendances had begun its process of relentless decline – a problem later addressed by the economist John Spraos in 1962. The 1966 study conducted for the Institute of Economic Affairs (Kelly, Norton, and Perry 1966) returned the focus to the underlying fragmentation of the industry and the problematic relations between the production, distribution and exhibition sectors. Alongside such policy‐oriented critical analysis, there also emerged more disinterested descriptive accounts of the industry. The landmark here is undoubtedly the seven‐volume documentation of developments from1886 to 1939 produced by Rachael Low (1997), the doyenne of British film history. As much a story of evolving structures of exhibition, distribution, production, technology, and policy as it is about films and filmmakers, Low’s account is grounded in a welter of empirical detail relating to sectors of the industry, companies, and individual films. While subsequent scholarship has provided greater factual accuracy in some areas, the level of information and the clear sense of the industrial basis and functioning of the cinema remain unsurpassed. A strong industrial focus can also be discerned in some of the first single‐volume histories of British cinema, notably those by Charles Oakley (1964) and Ernest Betts (1973). It is perhaps relevant that the authors concerned were either working critics or, in the case of Oakley, a specialist exhibitor and therefore part of the film ‘trade’. The initial flourishing of cinema studies in Britain during the 1970s brought with it a different set of intellectual concerns, beginning with a focus on questions of aesthetics and style, authorship, and meaning before evolving a more overtly theoretical engagement influenced by the discourses and methodologies of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. While the operations of the industry tended to be marginalised by the new intellectual agenda, there were important exceptions. For example, John Ellis’s (1975) study of Ealing Studios offers an insightful consideration of industrial developments in the 1940s, including the role of the state. The 1980s witnessed a growing concern with history and gradually the study of British cinema was opened up to new and revisionist scholarship, a process that also served to strengthen understandings of the development of the industry and its relationship to state intervention and film policy. Major contributions here include the 1983 collection, British Cinema History, edited by James Curran and Vincent Porter, which includes several essays on key aspects of the development and function of the industry (Curran and Porter 1983), while Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street’s Cinema and State (Dickinson and Street 1985) offered an ­exemplary consideration of six decades of film policy. As interest in British cinema history flourished, so did critical engagement with the contemporary state of the industry  –  epitomised by the collection, British Cinema Now, edited by Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick (1985). A similar approach



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informed New Questions of British Cinema, edited by Duncan Petrie (Petrie 1992), and the 2002 issue of the short‐lived Journal of British Popular Cinema, co‐edited by Petrie and Julian Petley (Petrie and Petley 2002). The focus on a particular historical conjuncture (often a decade) also became familiar, although the extent to which industry considerations are central depends very much on the interests of the author or editor. Among the most relevant here are John Hill’s study of the 1980s (Hill 1999), which features detailed analyses of film policy and the emergence of Channel 4, while Robert Murphy’s edited collection on the 1990s (Murphy 2000) features useful contributions on key industry trends, including ­globalisation and the rise of the multiplex. In conceptualising films as industrial products, such scholarship has also ­facilitated more grounded approaches to film analysis, with aesthetic factors being explored in relation to industrial conditions of production. This has been productively developed in studies of particular studios or production companies, with Vincent Porter’s consideration of ‘Creativity at Ealing Studios and Hammer Films’ (Porter 1983) – assessing the significance of the respective business strategies of studio heads Michael Balcon and James Carreras – an early exemplar. Industrially‐ informed film analysis has subsequently been developed and extended by a number of scholars, demonstrating in the process how institutional structures, new technologies, and changing conditions of production and consumption have impacted upon the creative process and the making of meaning. Recent examples include John Hill’s revisionist study of the extensive career of Ken Loach (Hill 2011), which indicates how different industrial contexts have influenced the development of his distinctive political and aesthetic preoccupations; while Jonathan Murray’s consideration of Scottish cinema in 1990s and 2000s (Murray 2014) reveals the extent to which increasingly transnational funding structures and markets have determined the content and style of Scottish films.

The Link Between Industry and Policy The relationship between past and present served to inspire scholarly debates in interesting ways and it is relevant that the publication of Dickinson and Street’s history of film policy appeared at the same time as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was busy dismantling the protective measures put in place by previous film acts. It is equally significant that some of the pioneering studies of the development of British film policy were by individuals like Simon Hartog who had actively campaigned for increased public intervention and support. A recurring feature of the analysis of policy initiatives as a response to perceived problems was the way in which new measures entailed consequences (intended or otherwise) that in turn created new problems for the industry. For example, in his

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study of the 1927 quota – the first major protective measure introduced in response to American domination – Hartog (1983) argued that ‘the 1927 Films Act had an objective that is not mentioned in its text: the creation of one or more British film combines’. In this way, a possible solution to the problem of external domination paves the way for internal monopoly, binding the two issues closely together. Similar insights can be drawn from the policy initiatives of the late 1940s, a period when Rank’s ill‐fated attempt on the American market coincided with the imposition of a 75% tax on American films by the government in 1947, prompted by the post‐war fiscal crisis. The subsequent Hollywood embargo on exporting films to Britain encouraged local producers, including Rank, to increase production to fill the anticipated gap. But when the duty was abolished in 1948, American films returned to British cinemas, wiping out the anticipated gains for British films and plunging the industry back into crisis. The response was the introduction of new protective measures, namely, the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) in 1949, followed by the Eady levy in the following year. Alongside the Quota, these constituted the key elements of film policy for the next three decades until their systematic dismantling by the Thatcher government (Hill 1999). The NFFC was replaced by a new agency, British Screen Finance, which ensured the continuation of some direct public subsidy for film production albeit in partnership with commercial partners, in an attempt to introduce a greater market responsiveness. The Tories also phased out Capital Allowances, a tax‐shelter scheme device that had boosted private investment in film production in the early 1980s, which resulted in a drop in investment from £270 million in 1986 to £49.6 million by 1989. But Thatcherite privatisation ultimately failed to galvanise the production industry and in the 1990s new forms of public support were introduced by John Major’s Conservative government. While these included a new regime of tax incentives introduced in 1992 to encourage private investment, the channelling of funds earmarked for good causes (including film production) from the new National Lottery launched in 1994 represented a more traditional form of public subsidy (Caterer 2011). The election on New Labour in 1997 ushered in an even more enthusiastic engagement on the part of the state, with film now being regarded as a key ‘creative industry’. The cornerstone policy here was the creation in 2000 of a new single agency, the Film Council  –  subsequently the UK Film Council (UKFC) – to consolidate and co‐ordinate a variety of functions previously carried out by a range of different bodies including British Screen, the BFI Production Board, and the British Film Commission. One of the key debates in the consideration of policy has revolved around a perceived tension between industrial and cultural justifications for state intervention. Until the creation of a Department of National Heritage in 1992 – renamed the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997  –  British film policy was the responsibility of the Board of Trade. While this appeared to suggest that the government’s concept of film was dictated by its status as an industry, Dickinson and Street point out that the quota was introduced at a time when the official



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government policy was in support of free trade. Therefore any exceptional status could only be justified by cultural arguments such as the social and propagandistic value of British films (Dickinson and Street 1985). This is supported by the 1952 PEP report: it seems reasonable to assume that government action to this day springs from the justifiable desire to ensure that for social and cultural reasons British audiences should be able to see British films. To this end the production industry has been assisted. (Political and Economic Planning 1952, p. 13)

This understanding persists. In their recent consideration of tax relief for film ­production in the 1990s and 2000s, Maggie Magor and Philip Schlesinger argue that different governments have been guided by ‘a longstanding emphasis on the  importance of safeguarding national identity through maintaining a film industry …. coupled with a recurrent need to invent new forms of economic ­intervention as older ones are deemed to have failed’ (2009, p. 300). Film policy debates have also been influenced by underlying ideological shifts around the purpose and justification of public intervention. The tripartite model of state support – the quota, the NFFC, and Eady – operated during a period when all political parties were guided by Keynesian economic principles, ensuring high levels of continuity with both Conservative and Labour administrations sharing a belief in the value of an interventionist state working in ­partnership with the private sector to ensure effective economic management. This is reflected in analyses of the film industry. The 1966 study by the Institute of Economic Affairs concluded that capitalist enterprise in the film industry was fettered by bad practices such as excessive bars, exclusive deal‐making, a narrowness of approach to projects and union restrictions, which in turn constrained artistic enterprise, a problem that could only be addressed by the state: ‘public intervention to reform the practices and structure of the industry is not interference with the rights of private enterprise: it is restoration of those rights’ (Kelly  et  al. 1966, p. 177). The measures proposed to reorganise the industry were thus framed as offering ‘the benefits of greatly augmented competition’ (Kelly et al. 1966, p. 192). But there were also dissenting voices, notably from the left, which rebuked government policy for failing to address the underlying problems of the industry. In his review of the Terry Report on the Future of the British Film Industry, John Ellis argues that the analysis of the industry provided by the report should have led the Committee to propose ‘the creation of a state sector as the key to the development of a planned mixed‐ownership industry’, rather than offering more right‐wing reformism: ‘large subsidies and the smoothing out of some of the more antagonistic contradictions’ (1976, p. 84). While in his Marxist study of the history of  labour power in the industry, Michael Chanan called for a re‐assessment of government intervention on the grounds that it had effectively functioned in the

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interests of business rather than promoting a more progressive film culture (Chanan 1976). For such writers, protective measures such as the quota and the NFFC had simply stimulated production without challenging the underlying privileging of commercial interests which continued to benefit both British and American companies. It is also worth noting that while the problem of monopoly continued to be acknowledged in official reports and policy discourse, there was clearly insufficient political will to tackle the issue. Indeed, the industry was the subject of no less than three reports by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission – 1966, 1983, and 1994 – which concurred that there was a problem in the exhibition and distribution sectors, yet no significant action was taken (Hill 1999). The Keynesian consensus was subsequently shattered by Thatcherism and the beginnings of what we now understand as neo‐liberalism. This led to the reduction and dismantling of public support and undermined the principle of subsidy in favour of entrepreneurial self‐reliance and the rule of the market. But it also prompted new thinking around credible alternatives with policy‐makers and academics such as Nick Garnham (1987) and Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole (1986) advocating a radical alternative to traditional arts funding regarded as elitist and rooted in outmoded views of both the individual artist and the privileged status of certain forms. A new emphasis was placed upon more accessible and popular forms of mass culture, of which film was a key example, the product of a cultural industry that facilitated greater social inclusiveness and pluralism and thus deserving of state support. Moreover, in breaking down barriers to access, the state needed to become less a provider of art and culture and more an enabler and catalyst (Mulgan and Worpole 1986, p. 111). While this implied that cultural policy needed to work much more with the grain of the market, it nevertheless provided an important alternative to establishment thinking. Arguably, a cultural industries approach came to inform the work of the British Film Institute in supporting independent and alternative film‐making, often in partnership with Channel 4, whose own remit to innovate and cater to diverse audiences made it a key player as a funder and broadcaster of British film (Stoneman 1992; MacCabe 1999). But the coming of New Labour marked yet another shift in policy thinking towards the rebranded ‘creative industries’. Stephen Pratten and Simon Deakin contrast the Blair government’s approach with the Thatcherite policy of deregulation, noting the new case for government support in relation to the ‘perception of  a film industry with inherent but unrealised potential which it is the role of  government to unlock, albeit in tandem with the market’ (1999, pp. 2–3). The creation of the Film Council and the implementation of New Labour’s film policy significantly raised the temperature of debate, a consequence of the increase in production finance and activity, coupled with the consolidation of power in the hands of a single semi‐autonomous quango. But it was also exacerbated by the way in which the new organisation set out its stall, most notably the provocative speech given by chairman, Alan Parker, on Bonfire Night in 2002,



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when he set out his vision for a sustainable British film industry. In stressing the need for a distribution‐led industry prepared to embrace the international market, Parker argued that: ‘we need to abandon altogether the “little England” vision of a UK film industry comprised of small British film companies delivering parochial British films … That British film industry never existed and in the brutal age of global capitalism, it never will’ (Parker 2002). The solution was to reinvent the industry as a creative film hub offering skills and services to the global market. For some commentators, the UK Film Council epitomised the shift towards a creative industries agenda. In his review of Film Policy during the first New Labour government, Tom Ryall points out that the film policy review group chaired by Tom Clarke MP and Stewart Till of PolyGram consisted mainly of industry ­personnel, which reflected the government’s key objectives for the review which were focussed upon economic and financial matters such as increasing the domestic market share for British films, as well as boosting their export performance, and creating a stable financial base for an industry notoriously prone to boom and bust. (2002, p. 8)

Margaret Dickinson and Sylvia Harvey take an even stronger line in identify how the Film Council and the new Regional Screen Agencies (RSAs) in England it subsequently helped to establish set about replacing what had been strong links to arts policy, with an industrial and economic strategy. In the case of RSAs, this policy was carried out in partnership with the new Regional Development Agencies which had also been set up by New Labour: It can be argued that … the deployment of London‐based production, distribution and exhibition funds and the priorities of the new Regional Screen Agencies have moved public policy away from cultural criteria and concerns and towards almost exclusively market‐based forms of judgement and evaluation. (Dickinson and Harvey 2005, p. 423)

Dickinson and Harvey also suggest that while the cultural industries approach of the 1980s sought to integrate high and popular forms and industry and culture to contest the dominant established forces and facilitate new voices, creative industries policy appeared to retreat back to the distinction between high art and popular culture, with film now located firmly in the latter camp. But others have insisted that some aspects of New Labour’s film policy reflect different principles. John Hill argues that the interweaving of distinct policy objectives became even more pronounced during the 2000s and that the UKFC was guided by a cultural as well as an industrial remit (Hill 2012). Arguing that the situation was rather more complicated than some commentators have suggested, Hill points out that just as cultural policies may have come to rest more on economic justifications, so economic policies have come to depend on cultural assumptions. So, while a new emphasis may have been placed on revenues and

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value added, this also altered the way in which state support for film was perceived. Notably, the concern with economic impact had moved the focus away from a film’s profitability: In this respect, what was decried in some circles as crude instrumentalism … became, in the case of film, quite an effective lobbying tool by virtue of the way in which it permitted a shift away from arguments about whether the industry was capable of ‘standing on its own two feet’ towards arguments about the more general contribution that the film industry made to the economy, both directly and indirectly. (Hill 2012, p. 344)

This underpinned the maintenance of quite considerable levels of support for film production, a state of affairs that was also consistently attacked, notably by Alexander Walker (2004), on the grounds that it actually removed market responsiveness from the funding system.

Challenges to the National Frame Writing in the mid‐2000s, Nick Redfern argued that the principle of a national cinema in the UK was ‘no longer motivated by defence against the dominance of Hollywood. Rather, it represents a positive attempt to develop a sustainable film industry through the development of an indigenous film industry in a highly transnational market’ (Redfern 2007). Indeed, one of the recurring themes in debates about the British film industry had been the on‐going relationship with American interests. This dated back to the teens when US companies began establishing a presence in the distribution and production sectors, beginning with Vitagraph, who registered a British renting company in 1912, followed by Fox in 1916 and Famous‐Lasky (Paramount) in 1919. The ability of companies to cross borders and operate freely in Britain also allowed Hollywood to take advantage of measures ostensibly designed to protect or encourage local production beginning with the 1927 quota when the Americans began producing ‘British’ films. In devising a rather vague definition of what qualified as a British film, which made it relatively easy for outsiders to benefit directly from the legislation, the Act also set a precedent that would recur in subsequent revisions to that definition in the late 1940s and the 2000s. External penetration of the British industry was a key theme in Klingender and Legg’s (1937) report, which also revealed the extent to which the vertically integrated British combines provided opportunities for the formation of trans‐ Atlantic corporate links. Fox acquired a substantial shareholding in Gaumont British in 1929 and Warner Bros. bought 25% of ABPC in 1941; while in 1935 Alexander Korda joined United Artists and one year later Rank acquired a stake in



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Universal through General Film Distributors. Moreover, as Rank began to expand his empire so he also acquired the pre‐existing connections with Fox and Universal, prompting Margaret Dickinson to note that, ‘the issues of domestic monopoly and of American competition were inextricably linked’ (1983, p. 78). Underpinning all of this was the continued importance of the UK domestic market: The problem of the British industry in the face of American competition is more serious than that of any other film industry, for the absence of a language barrier and of a high import duty makes the cost of importing American films almost negligible, whilst the size of the British market, although not large enough to make British films profitable, is quite large enough to make it the most important of Hollywood’s ­overseas markets and to justify the maintenance of powerful American distributing organisations in this country. Indeed, for all practical purposes, the British market is part of Hollywood’s home market. (Political and Economic Planning 1952, p. 288)

This state of affairs ensured that American companies continued to prove enterprising in terms of taking advantage of new measures designed to support the British industry and encourage production. This was certainly the case with the Eady levy which, as Dickinson and Street note, provided a higher rate of subsidy than its European counterparts and so proved attractive to Hollywood producers who simply established a UK subsidiary to make films that qualified as ‘British’ (1985, p. 235). Thus, by the 1960s, American involvement in the production sector of the British film industry had expanded to such a level that ‘after 1961 it became increasingly difficult to define any part of the industry as British, rather than Anglo American’ (Dickinson and Street 1985, p. 238). The boost that Hollywood finance gave to the profile of British cinema in the 1960s (Walker 1974) also meant that the America was no longer simply a competitor or threat but rather was increasingly being seen as a partner to be actively encouraged, despite the risks attached to dependence upon outside investment. Thus, when Hollywood finance for British films was withdrawn at the beginning of the 1970s, the American majors continued to exercise a dominant position in UK industry through their distribution interests (Petley 1992). When the decline in the cinema audience was finally arrested in the mid‐1980s by the arrival of the multiplex, this opened the door for increased American involvement in the exhibition sector via companies such as Showcase, UCI, and Warner Village. As Stuart Hanson notes, this has further exacerbated the dominance of Hollywood product on British screens (with the same film sometimes being shown on more than one screen in the same multiplex) and the marginalisation of independent exhibitors in the UK (Hanson 2000). In recent years, US investment in British production has been actively solicited via schemes such as the big budget tax incentive (or Section 42), while even the subsequent Section  48 tax break introduced in 1997 for productions of under £15 million was in part an attempt to help the UK compete with Ireland for inward

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investment (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002). And as we have seen, the UK Film Council regarded attracting American productions to Britain and encouraging UK/US co‐productions as central to the creation of a sustainable ‘British’ film industry. This prompted Dickinson and Harvey to argue that the objective of the UKFC was ‘to enable the British film industry to compete, not against Hollywood, but against potential rivals for Hollywood investment’ (2005, p. 427). But this also confirmed how much the British situation was inextricably part of wider global developments, as Toby Miller has shown in his consideration of the significance of the new international division of cultural labour: Across the screen industries, labour market slackness and developments in global transportation and communications technology have diminished the need for film industries to be concentrated in one place. Fragmentation reduces labour costs and allows multinational companies to take advantage of tax incentives, exchange rates and other factors of production, moving on when they are offered more favourable terms elsewhere … The trend is clearly towards horizontal connections to other media and a break‐up of public‐private distinctions in ownership, control and programing philosophy. (Miller 2000, p. 38)

Britain has been an enthusiastic participant, actively encouraging inward productions and investment via the provision of talent, services, locations, and subsidies. To help facilitate traffic between Britain and Hollywood, the UK government also opened a film office in Los Angeles in 1998. But the British film industry’s international context includes more than the on‐ going relationship with America. In the 1920s, some sections of the British industry, notably British International Pictures – described as ‘a major British combine with international aspirations’ (Higson 1999, p. 279)  –  joined forces with continental partners in the Film Europe initiative as a way of competing against the Hollywood juggernaut. While this proved a short‐lived phenomenon, brought to an end by the emergence of sound (and with it a new emphasis on linguistic specificity) and increasing political divisions in Europe, it did indicate a different kind of transnational co‐operation. In more recent years, Britain’s membership of the European Union has facilitated a number of co‐productions with European partners, several of them involving British Screen, although the British government’s withdrawal from participation in the EU co‐production scheme Eurimages in 1996 did made collaboration more difficult (Kim 2003). Britain’s ambivalent position between the United States and Europe can be linked to the tension between industrial and cultural imperatives that have featured in recent policy debates. This came to the fore in the mid‐2000s with the devising of a new legal definition of what counted as a British film and therefore of what was eligible for tax relief, Lottery funding and other types of support (Higson 2011; Hill 2012). Britain’s membership of the European Union entails an acceptance of EU policy which exempts culture and heritage from the single market. This means that tax aid is regarded as public support and can be used to



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support culturally British films; however, provenance had to be demonstrated and so led to a new legal definition of what constituted a British film based for the first time on a new ‘cultural test’. Guided by the desire to remain attractive to inward American investment, the initial proposal placed a strong emphasis on the use of British production facilities and the employment of British nationals in key production roles as qualifying criteria. But the plan was rejected by the European Commission on the grounds that it was insufficiently concerned with cultural imperatives, forcing the UK government to revise the proposals by substantially increasing the emphasis on the cultural content of qualifying films. Thus an obvious attempt to stimulate American investment through neo‐liberal trade reform was blocked and refashioned in line with the European idea of the ‘exception culturelle’. The concept of the national frame has not just been challenged from outside. Hand in hand with increasing transnationalism, the British film industry has also developed a new focus on the local or regional (Redfern 2007). The initial decision to administer Lottery money for film through not one agency but the separate arts councils of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland created the opportunity for new production centres (Caterer 2011). This was followed by the establishment of new ‘national’ screen agencies in the Celtic nations, signalling a devolutionary shift away from a singular unified ‘British’ industry. This was followed by the creation of Regional Screen Agencies in England. While a major justification for this new localism was tied in with the social and economic claims made for the creative industries, it also had an important cultural impact in forging a more pluralistic understanding of ‘British’ cinema. This led to ideas for nationally‐specific policies to stimulate the production of Scottish, Welsh, and even Northern Irish cinema, underpinned by separate funding bodies and support structures (McIntyre 1996; Petrie 2000; Hill 2006; Murray 2014). While economic justifications frequently underpinned new funding initiatives – notably the Glasgow Film Fund, which was a partnership between local authorities and the European Regional Development Fund – such devolutionary developments with the British film industry also served to emphasise cultural diversity and pluralism, in addition to arguably creating a new small national cinema in Scotland (Murray 2007).

Changing Relations with Television Since the launch of Channel 4 in 1982 ushered in a crucial new source of production finance, it has become impossible to discuss the British film industry without also considering the significance of television. Prior to the 1980s, the small screen had been regarded primarily as a threat, with the rapid popularisation of broadcast television in the 1950s routinely linked to the decline in cinema attendances (Docherty et  al. 1987). But the forging of a new relationship based on mutual

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benefit has facilitated a more detailed revision of our understanding of the links between the two industries. Indeed, television offered the film industry a potential new market, but British film producers were initially resistant to sell their films to the BBC (Buscombe 1991). This antipathy continued, even when the widespread popularisation of television following the establishment of ITV in 1955 made the small screen increasingly attractive to producers attempting to find ways of compensating for the decline in cinema audiences. The industry’s determination to hold out is marked by the creation in the late 1950s of the Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) by the Cinema Exhibitors Association, the British Film Producers Association, the Federation of British Film‐makers, and the Association of Specialised Film Producers. This body used a fund, raised by a levy of one farthing on cinema admissions, to dissuade producers from selling to television by taking their films out of circulation. While initially successful, the policy ultimately increased the price for films television was willing to pay which producers found impossible to resist and by the end of 1964, the FIDO scheme was replaced by a five‐year hold‐back. The popularisation of television impacted on the film industry in other ways. Significant links between cinema and television companies begin to develop in the 1950s following the establishment of a commercial alternative to the BBC. Sidney Bernstein’s Granada group, whose business had been built in exhibition, was quick off the mark, securing the ITV regional franchise for the North of England in 1954. A decade later, ABPC acquired a controlling interest in Thames TV, and in 1972 Rank purchased 38% of Southern TV (Dickinson and Street 1995). By the 1970s the situation had begun to move in the opposite direction as ambitious television executives were lured by the glamour and potentially lucrative business of feature film production. The key figure here is Lew Grade and his company Associated Television Corporation (subsequently the Associated Communication Corporation) which, in 1975, prompted by the opportunity for international sales and the emergence of new markets and revenue streams for films facilitated by video and satellite television, announced a major new production programme (Wood 1983). The company also bought the Classic chain of cinemas and established distribution outlets on both sides of the Atlantic. But many of their films performed poorly and by 1981 the venture was in serious trouble, with the spectacular box‐office failure of Raise the Titanic becoming the latest high‐profile manifestation of the boom‐and‐bust tendency (Walker 1985). Television had long been regarded as a significant source of potential investment in film production and in an analysis of the changing relationship between the two industries, with debates around a possible levy on the screening of films on television that could be used to support British cinema retrospectively traced by John Hill (1996). Initially proposed in 1973 by the Cinematograph Films Council, this issue had also been taken up by both the Terry Report of 1976 and the Annan Report on the future of British broadcasting in 1977. Meanwhile production methods were developing, with a number of television companies establishing wholly‐owned subsidiaries to make feature‐length dramas originated on film.



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These included Euston Films, set up by Thames in 1974 (Alvarado and Stewart 1985), followed in 1979 by both Southern Pictures, an offshoot of Southern TV and Black Lion, set up by ITC/ACC. However, different union agreements helped to ensure that the majority of the products made by these companies were primarily for broadcast. The real watershed came in 1982 with the establishment of Channel 4 and its much‐heralded innovative approach to doing business. As a publisher/broadcaster, the channel sought to commission feature‐length drama that would also be allowed a theatrical window prior to broadcast. This quickly led to Channel 4 becoming a major new source of film finance for low‐budget independent production which assumed three distinct forms: (1) fully financing low budget films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985); (2) as an equity partner in co‐productions with other funders; or (3) by providing a licence for broadcast. Channel 4 quickly assumed a key importance in film industry debates, beginning with Martyn Auty’s (1985) discussion of the early evolution in the channel’s approach to film, including a shift towards supporting projects with more obvious theatrical potential, the setting up of a sales arm, Film Four International, and the forging of partnerships with European and American production companies. Beyond this, Channel 4 made a further contribution by way of an annual subvention to BFI production and became a key partner in British Screen Finance when it was set up in 1985 (Petrie 1991). Thus by the end of the 1980s, the channel had contributed to more than 150 British feature films, making it arguably the most significant player at the low‐budget end of production (Pym 1992) and inspiring other television companies to follow their example, most notably the establishment of BBC Films in the late 1980s as a separate unit within the corporation’s drama department (Hill 1996). The significance of television was further clarified by Colin MacCabe, former Head of Production at the BFI, who argues that Channel 4’s contribution to film funding actually constituted ‘a parafiscal levy on British television revenues’ which was used as a new form of subsidy for British cinema (1992, p. 22). This is supported by John Hill’s argument that the success of the channel’s role in film production had in a large part ‘depended upon its insulation from purely commercial considerations’ (1993, p. 214). For MacCabe, this arrangement also represented a much more effective subsidy system than those operating in Continental Europe because it was run by commissioning editors and gave an enhanced role to producers, both of which meant that much greater consideration was given to the film’s intended audience. Thus, we see the beginnings of an analysis that is responding to the market. But in 1993 the situation altered radically when Channel 4 moved from a situation where it was funded by a levy on the advertising revenues of the ITV companies to a position of selling its own advertising. This initiated a much more commercial imperative which impacted on the channel’s involvement in film funding, a shift that can be signified by the different audience appeal of two low‐budget films fully funded by Channel 4: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Trainspotting (1996) (Figure 15.1).

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Figure 15.1  The role of Channel 4: Trainspotting (1996).

A critical analysis of ‘the logic of convergence’ driven primarily by Channel 4 was provided by John Caughie. In considering the creation of ‘a British art cinema, balanced precariously between a European sensibility and the North American market, which is economically dependent on television’ (1996, p. 217), Caughie doubted that the cultural remit of a national broadcasting system could be sustained within the economic logic of the international marketplace. Moreover, the logic of convergence is linked to the logic of interdependency: ‘it is pragmatic rather than principled. It assumes a unified industry, the logic of a unified industry is a unified culture, and the principle which is at stake is diversity and difference’ (Caughie 1996, p. 222). Caughie’s concerns seemed to be borne out in 1998 when FilmFour Ltd. was set up as a separate company. In 1997, the Channel had been freed from paying a levy to ITV on excess profits – a stipulation that had been made in 1993 when the funding formula had been changed. This facilitated a greater focus on commercial expansion  –  underlined by Channel 4’s evolution away from being a publisher‐ broadcaster and towards a cross‐media corporation. Essentially a mini‐studio, FilmFour comprised production, distribution, and sales and was headed by Paul Webster, a film industry professional who had worked for Palace and Miramax  –  unlike his predecessors David Rose and David Aukin, whose backgrounds were in TV drama and theatre respectively. The new company also



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increased its investment form £17 million in 1998 to £33 million in 2000, with production split between commercially oriented projects and a low budget experimental strand (FilmFour Lab) (Hill 2002). This was accompanied by greater international collaboration via partnership deals with Warner Bros. and the German company Senator; a move echoed by BBC Films own new focus on supporting middle budget features, often with Hollywood companies as co‐producers. Thus, the kind of production supported by British television moved away from the original Channel 4 low‐budget model in favour of the norms of mainstream Hollywood – a shift consistent with the strategic priorities of the UK Film Council which often featured as a co‐funder of features alongside FilmFour or BBC Films. But this apparent manifestation of convergence also entailed a new sense of product differentiation or divergence. As Hannah Andrews suggests, the analysis that had guided the UKFC’s mission suggested that television had actually served to hold British cinema back as its focus was regarded as too parochial. Thus: FilmFour was born of a rival industry blamed for many of the film industry’s ‘problems’: the smallness of its ambition, competition for domestic audiences, the poverty of British film’s aesthetic. FilmFour attempted to answer these issues by disavowing television: by funding films as defined by the mainstream commercial model increasingly dominant in the industry as a whole. (Andrews 2014, pp. 105–106)

Once again history seemed destined to repeat itself, however. The strategy failed spectacularly and in 2002 FilmFour was closed down, its distribution and sales arm disbanded and its production arm reintegrated back into Channel 4’s drama department.

Conclusion In a 2012 essay, Sarah Street argued that ‘during the last ten years the most frequently cited aesthetic and economic shifts influencing the British film industry are the impacts of digital technologies’ (2012, p. 377). While questions of technology had featured previously (Ellis 1975; Petrie 1991), the advent of the digital age has placed this concern much more centre stage. The initial impact of digital technology on low‐budget production, inspired by the Danish Dogme 95 phenomenon which led to the establishment of new funding schemes to encourage similar innovation in the UK, was considered by Duncan Petrie in 2002. But Street is able to survey a wider sphere that includes subsequent developments in production, distribution, and exhibition – with new High Definition systems effectively rendering celluloid obsolete in the field of production and (increasingly) as an exhibition medium. These shifts have been encouraged by various institutional initiatives, notably the UKFC’s New Cinema Fund and Digital Screen Network

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Scheme, and the focus of certain production companies, notably Warp X, on innovative low‐budget digital filmmaking. But as Street also indicates, new technology has given a boost to big‐budget internationally‐funded productions predicated on special effects, such as the Harry Potter franchise, which have been central to the promotion of the industry as a global production hub. Indeed, discourses of globalisation are increasingly bound up with the role of technology in facilitating new ways of developing and exploiting markets. The advent of the digital also calls into question the veracity of the category of ‘film’ in future debates. This echoes other aspects of this chapter which, in the attempt to make sense of an extensive field of scholarship and analysis, has focused on issues that effectively complicate and problematise the key terms being used. Thus, a close consideration of film policy reveals the impossibility of understanding the industrial without a simultaneous appreciation of cultural considerations. Similarly, the national frame denoted by the term ‘British’, obscures the significance of both the wider context of inter or transnational relationships – notably those involving American interests  –  and the more recent impact of internal trends towards devolution, regionalism, and localism. While in addition to the wholesale shift brought about by digital technology, the fortunes of British cinema have been bound up with those of television since the 1950s and from the early 1980s the two industries have become inextricably interconnected. But at the same time the analysis has revealed a striking degree of continuity, notably in the way the central problems and challenges facing the industry have continually dictated the kinds of questions asked and accounts given by scholars, journalists, policy‐makers, and industry insiders alike. It is instructive to compare this to the way in which the history of the American film industry has been framed as a narrative of heroic achievement, an industry created by immigrants that evolved a highly successful business model, providing the basis for global success and unparalleled influence on the wider development of moving‐image industries and aesthetics. The shadow of Hollywood has undoubtedly impacted negatively upon critical understandings and evaluations of British cinema, whose own development has been essentially reactive, dictated by external forces and developments. Yet this has also galvanised critical engagement, with the result that those debates concerned with the historical development of the British film industry and policy repeatedly convey a sense of commitment, not only in the interest of knowledge, insight and understanding but also in terms of facilitating possible change and improvement.

References Alvarado, Manuel and Stewart, John (1985). Made for Television: Euston Films Limited. London: BFI. Andrews, Hannah (2014). Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergence since 1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Auty, Martyn (1985). But is it cinema? In: British Cinema Now (ed. Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick), 57–70. London: BFI. Auty, Martyn and Roddick, Nick (eds.) (1985). British Cinema Now. London: BFI. Baillieu, Bill and Goodchild, John (2002). The British Film Business. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Betts, Ernest (1973). The Film Business: A History of British Cinema, 1896–1972. London: Allen & Unwin. Buscombe, Edward (1991). All bark and no bite: the film industry’s response to television. In: Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (ed. John Corner), 197–206. London: BFI. Caterer, James (2011). The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Caughie, John (1996). The logic of convergence. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 215–223. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton. Chanan, Michael (1976). Labour Power in the British Film Industry. London: BFI. Curran, James and Porter, Vincent (eds.) (1983). British Cinema History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Dickinson, Margaret (1983). The state and the consolidation of monopoly. In: British Cinema History (ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter), 74–95. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Dickinson, Margaret and Harvey, Sylvia (2005). Film policy in the United Kingdom: New  Labour at the movies. The Political Quarterly 76 (3): 420–429. doi:10.1111/ j.1467‐923X.2005.00701.x. Dickinson, Margaret and Street, Sarah (1985). Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: BFI. Docherty, David, Morrison, David, and Tracey, Michael (1987). The Last Picture Show? Britain’s Changing Film Audience. London: BFI. Eberts, Jake and Illott, Terry (1990). My Indecision Is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films. London: Faber and Faber. Ellis, John (1975). Made in Ealing. Screen 16 (1): 78–127. Ellis, John (1976). The future of the British film industry. Screen 17 (1): 84–93. Garnham, Nick (1987). Concepts of culture: public policy and the cultural industries. Cultural Studies 1 (1): 54–61. Hanson, Stuart (2000). Spoilt for choice? Multiplexes in the 90s. In: British Cinema of the 90s (ed. Robert Murphy), 48–59. London: BFI. Hartog, Simon (1983). State protection of a beleaguered industry. In: British Cinema History (ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter), 59–73. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Higson, Andrew (1999). Polyglot films for an international market: E.A. Dupont, the British film industry, and the idea of a European cinema, 1926–1930. In: “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby), 274–301. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Higson, Andrew (2011). Film England: Culturally English Film‐making since 1990. London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, John (1993). Government policy and the British film industry, 1979–90. European Journal of Communication 8 (2): 203–224.

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Hill, John (1996). British television and film: the making of a relationship. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 151–176. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, John (2002). “Changing of the Guard”: Channel 4, FilmFour and film policy: interview with Paul Webster. Journal of Popular British Cinema 5: 53–63. Hill, John (2006). Cinema and Northern Ireland. London: BFI. Hill, John (2011). Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, John (2012). “This is for the Batmans as well as the Vera Drakes”: economics, culture and UK government film policy in the 2000s. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 333–356. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2012.0094. Kelly, Terrence, Norton, Graham, and Perry, George (1966). A Competitive Cinema. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Kim, Jongmee (2003). The funding and distribution structure of the British film industry  in  the 1990s: localization and commercialization of British cinema towards  a  global  audience. Media, Culture and Society 25 (3): 405–413. doi:10.1177/ 0163443703025003006. Klingender, FD and Legg, Stuart (1937). Money Behind the Screen. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kuhn, Michael (2002). One Hundred Films and a Funeral. London: Thorogood. Kulik, Karol (1975). Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles. London: W.H. Allen. Low, Rachael (1997). The History of the British Film. London: Routledge. MacCabe, Colin (1992). Subsidies, audiences, producers. In: British Cinema Now (ed. Duncan Petrie), 22–28. London: BFI. MacCabe, Colin (1999). The Eloquence of the Vulgar. London: BFI. Macnab, Geoffrey (1993). J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Magor, Maggie and Schlesinger, Philip (2009). For this relief much thanks: taxation, film policy and the UK government. Screen 50 (3): 299–317. doi:10.1093/screen/hjp017. McIntyre, Steve (1996). Art and industry: regional film and video policy in the UK. In: Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (ed. Albert Moran), 209–226. London: Routledge. Miller, Toby (2000). The film industry and the government: “Endless Mr Beans and Mr Bonds?”. In: British Cinema of the 90s (ed. Robert Murphy), 39–47. London: BFI. Mulgan, Geoff and Worpole, Ken (1986). Saturday Night or Sunday Morning? From Arts to Industry – New Forms of Cultural Policy. London: Comedia. Murphy, Robert (1983a). A brief studio history. In: Gainsborough Melodrama (ed. Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy), 3–13. London: BFI. Murphy, Robert (1983b). Rank’s attempt on the American market, 1944–9. In: British Cinema History (ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter), 164–178. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Murphy, Robert (ed.) (2000). British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI. Murray, Jonathan (2007). Scotland. In: The Cinema of Small Nations (ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie), 76–92. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Murray, Jonathan (2014). The New Scottish Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Oakley, CA (1964). Where We Came In: 70 Years of the British Film Industry. London: Allen & Unwin.



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Parker, Alan. (2002). ‘Building a sustainable British Film industry’. Available at: http:// alanparker.com/essay/building‐a‐sustainable‐uk‐film‐industry (accessed 14 October 2018). Petley, Julian (1992). Independent distribution in the UK: problems and proposals. In: New Questions of British Cinema (ed. Duncan Petrie), 76–94. London: BFI. Petrie, Duncan (1991). Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Petrie, Duncan (ed.) (1992). New Questions of British Cinema. London: BFI. Petrie, Duncan (2000). Screening Scotland. London: BFI. Petrie, Duncan (2002). British low budget production and digital technology. Journal of Popular British Cinema 5: 64–76. Political and Economic Planning (1952). The British Film Industry. London: PEP. Porter, Vincent (1983). The context of creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer films. In: British Cinema History (ed. James Curran and Vincent Porter), 179–207. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Porter, Vincent (2001). All change at Elstree: Warner Bros., ABPC and British film policy, 1945–1961. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21 (1): 5–35. Pratten Stephen and Simon Deakin. (1999). Competitiveness Policy and Economic Organisation: The Case of the British Film Industry. ESRC Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper No. 127. Pym, John (1992). Film on Four: A Survey 1982–1991. London: BFI. Redfern, Nick (2007). Defining British cinema: transnational and territorial film policy in the United Kingdom. Journal of British Cinema and Television 4: 150–164. Roddick, Nick (1985). If the United States spoke Spanish, we would have a film industry…. In: British Cinema Now (ed. Nick Roddick and Martyn Auty), 3–18. London: BFI. Rowson, Simon (1936). A statistical survey of the cinema industry in Great Britain in 1934. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 99: 67–129. Ryall, Tom (2002). New Labour and the cinema: culture, politics and economics. Journal of Popular British Cinema 5: 5–20. Spraos, John (1962). The Decline of Cinema: An Economist’s Report. London: George Allen & Unwin. Stoneman, Rod (1992). Sins of commission. Screen 33 (2): 127–144. Street, Sarah (2012). Digital Britain and the spectre/spectacle of new technologies. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 377–399. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2012.0096. Walker, Alexander (1974). Hollywood: England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties. London: Michael Joseph. Walker, Alexander (1985). National Heroes: The British Film Industry in the 70s and 80s. London: Harrap. Walker, Alexander (2004). Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry. London: Orion. Wood, Linda (1983). British Films 1971–1981. London: BFI.

16

British Cinema and Technology Sarah Street

Introduction Following the Academy Awards in 2014, there were many reports of something considered to be remarkable, as one headline noted: ‘How a London digital effects firm won an Oscar for helping to make one of the year’s biggest films’ (Buchan 2014, p. 16). That film was Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013, UK/USA), and the newspaper article celebrated the work of Framestore, a Soho‐based visual effects company responsible for the remarkable computer‐generated imagery (CGI) that contributed greatly to the film’s success. While Gravity appeared to present an unusual case of unsung heroes  –  the boffins in the backroom  –  its narrative of behind‐the‐scenes British technical ingenuity is not. While technology has, and continues to be, a highly significant aspect of British cinema’s past and present, it more often appears as a minor theme as if in orbit, a long way from the epicentre of scholarship more typically concerned with aesthetics or representation. Even within industrial studies major technological breakthroughs such as the coming of sound, colour, widescreen, 3‐D, and digital formats are seen as being driven by external interests connected to Hollywood’s domination. While British inventors and entrepreneurs might have been involved at key stages, the end result is always the same: British ingenuity is excellent, even brilliant, but it needs the resources and entrepreneurial enterprise of a globally dominant film industry to fully exploit it, to take it out of the back rooms into studios and the world’s auditoria. The connections between British cinema and technology are, however, more complex, extending beyond significant inventions and technical specificities to broader issues of technology transfer, transnational exchange, cultural and ideological imperatives, and responses to innovation more generally. This chapter will A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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focus on key aspects of technological change that have affected the world’s film industries from the perspective of British cinema. It explores how tumultuous shifts such as the coming of sound or the more gradual rise of colour film offer related yet different experiences of how particular technologies are negotiated and with what consequences. The aim is to assess British cinema’s involvement with the multiple, transnational trajectories of technological history, both engaging with and departing from predominant routes at varying historical moments. The relationship between technology and British cinema amounts to more than the latter being simply on the receiving end of invasive and highly capitalised inventions from the USA. Understanding how technology has informed the nature of national cinema and its transnational relations as a more dynamic process is at the heart of how film industries and their aesthetics change over time. Film scholars have written about technology in a number of ways, as detailed by Branigan (1986). Some focus on ‘great inventors’ whose trials and triumphs can be likened to romantic ‘adventures’ whereby gifted individuals are responsible for major technological breakthroughs. Other approaches are grounded in the multiplicity of technologies available at any one time, each aiming to overcome similar problems such as how to introduce sound on film, by emphasising their respective strengths and weaknesses to explain success or failure. Theories based more ­centrally in economics tend to examine the various phases of technological innovation by looking at invention, innovation, and diffusion, each determined by the desire to maximise profits and with success more likely when supported by a robust, management‐led business model. As Branigan’s study of colour film, ­however, concluded, none of these approaches takes into sufficient consideration ideological motivations for technological change in cases which cannot be explained solely by technical superiority. Drawing on the work of Marxist historian Jean‐Louis Comolli (1971–72), Branigan argued that while the knowledge for developing a particular technology might have been available for some time, its application at a particular historical moment is determined by contemporaneous ideological and economic demands. In the case of colour, well‐established realist codes of representation that dated back to the Renaissance and were fundamental to black‐and‐white cinematography were reaffirmed and extended by Technicolor in the 1930s. This idea was further applied in Winston’s observations on how new colour stocks were thus deployed to reflect dominant, western ideological codes and taste cultures at a time when they appeared to need reinforcement (Winston 1996, pp. 39–57). There are indeed continuities with an emphasis on the application of digital technologies on high‐definition and resolution, on honing new media to present visual experiences that appear to capture ‘the real’ by exceeding the capabilities of the human eye. In their book on methodological approaches to film history, Allen and Gomery advocated that technological histories should not be limited to cataloguing the inventions and activities of ‘great men’ but seek to explain ‘how particular pieces of technology came to be developed at a particular time, their relationship to the

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existing state of technology, the extent and nature of their use, and the consequence of that use – whether foreseen or unforeseen’ (Allen and Gomery 1985, p. 110). Such investigations, they argued, can most productively work together to gain a fuller appreciation of the significance of technological film history. Thinking even more broadly, Koszarski (2011, p. 3) observed that the most interesting work is less involved in mining some clearly defined area of study than in exploring the web of connections that reaches across all aspects of moving image media. Instead of just digging deeper, these historians trawl across the landscape horizontally, drawing on the tool kits of many different disciplines to answer questions about the movies which no one before had ever thought to ask.

Thinking about cinema and technology ‘horizontally’ indeed provides a useful method of connecting the disparate strands which are interwoven throughout history. Since many of the major technological shifts in film history have been associated with Hollywood, the literature and aforementioned approaches have tended to concentrate on American companies such as Technicolor, Western Electric, Panavision, and Red Digital Cinema. Indeed, most studies that concentrate on Britain deal with responses to American companies, systems, inventions, and representational modes. This reactive model tends to note how British cinema was repeatedly on the receiving end of inventions that originated elsewhere, often resulting in further entrenching Hollywood’s domination as with Western Electric’s supply of sound equipment to British cinemas at the end of the 1920s (Murphy 1984, pp. 146–147). Similarly, when CinemaScope arrived in 1953, ‘Britain’s production houses were quickly obliged to negotiate the tremors produced by a new imperialist format from overseas’ (Chibnall 2010, p. 149). While technology can indeed be seen to have reinforced Hollywood’s domination, this chapter proposes that its dissemination and diffusion in many ways resulted in productive exchanges, creative appropriations, aesthetic experimentation, and even economic success. By understanding the global movement of technologies as dynamic processes that operated both dialectically and reciprocally in different national contexts, British cinema’s significance in this regard is opened up to new approaches and insights and even brings to light case‐study films that depart from typical canonical formations. Also, by recognising the tenacity of long‐term ideological preoccupations such as the pursuit of realism noted above, continuities between the various significant technological shifts can be discerned.

Sound The case of sound cinema is instructive in this regard. Although it could be described as further entrenching American power over the British exhibition sector, causing unemployment among cinema musicians and actors and ­



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considerable disruption for several years, accounts also demonstrate the multi‐­ faceted nature of its consequences that point to a less clear‐cut verdict (Murphy 1984; 2012). Like any momentous technological change, the coming of sound was a rupture that closed some doors but also enabled new cinematic formations, an exhibition boom, transnational alliances, and styles of filmmaking that in the long term were very important for the future development of British cinema. As with other new technologies, sound cinema had its inventors, technical variations, economic models, ideological imperatives, and specific conditions pertaining to Britain. Inventors such as Cecil Hepworth were interested in sound from 1910, developing a sound‐on‐disc system called the Vivaphone that was popular in the US but which failed to sustain its early success. Sound experiments continued and in the late 1920s a few British systems including De Forest Phonofilms/British Talking Pictures and British Acoustic competed with the large American companies Western Electric and RCA. The shared language placed acute emphasis on the profits to be gained by developing the best sound systems for Anglo‐American compatibility. In keeping with the economic history model whereby concerns backed by strong business structures won out, Western Electric and RCA became the dominant suppliers of equipment in British cinemas by 1933. This was in part achieved by forbidding interchangeability of sound systems: only films made using Western Electric could be screened using Western Electric equipment. The principle of product control was one Technicolor applied successfully later in the 1930s in order to dominate the market for colour films. Yet the less successful enterprises like British Phonotone were not insignificant, initiating brief collaborative enterprises with German companies such as Tobis‐Klangfilm, the rest of Europe’s main talkie equipment supplier. The trend for Multi‐Language Versions (MLVs) of films also accelerated transnational co‐operation involving European and American companies. So, while the standard narrative of how Hollywood extended its reach through the talkies within Britain, its most lucrative overseas market, cannot be challenged, this was only one strand of a complex historical process involving ­different perspectives, protagonists and themes. Murphy’s recent work on the coming of sound adds a crucial dimension that is often missing from histories of technology: discussion of the films. He makes a compelling case for thinking about the impact of the talkies on British language films, particularly how ‘the first wave of sound films released between 1929 and 1931 sets out the agenda for the future of British cinema, an agenda that would be developed and built on in future decades’ (Murphy 2012, p. 553). In particular, the addition of sound enabled class dimensions of British dramas to register quite prominently, working within a variety of popular generic formats that eased the British film industry’s recovery through the ruptures caused by sound and the impact of the economic Depression. Hearing a range of British accents for the first time on screen enabled films to communicate a further register of realism in ways that appealed to different taste publics or not, as, contrary to expectation, American accents were not necessarily disliked but even considered to be exotic.

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Figure 16.1  The transition to sound: Maurice Elvey’s ‘cross‐class drama’ The Water Gypsies (1931).

In this way the study of a major technological shift leads to a productive analysis of films often overlooked or at least considered to be less significant, for example, Maurice Elvey’s acute cross‐class drama The Water Gypsies (1931) (Figure  16.1) rather than well‐mined, canonical early sound films such as Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929). Somewhat paradoxically, the import of largely American sound equipment facilitated a new phase of national differentiation based on accent and locale as well as the internationalist ambitions of companies such as Gaumont‐ British in the 1930s. In this way understanding technology is fundamentally related  to how it is applied; the same invention will have a different impact ­wherever it is used. The introduction of new technology can indeed result in national variants in terms of application, as a study of early sound cinema in France and America also demonstrates (O’Brien 2005). The French emphasis on reproducing a performance staged for recording resulted in a preference for direct sound. Hollywood, on the other hand, emphasised tight synchronisation to make sure sound served storytelling intelligibility as far as possible. Such studies recognise the importance of creative, nationally‐inflected responses to innovation that prevent new processes and systems from being applied uniformly. While the diffusion and transfer of  technology involve exporting equipment, expertise, and preferred modes of



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application, there is room for variation. This operation is profoundly transnational as technologies invented in one country travel across the world, resulting in diverse responses varying from collaboration and synergy to competition and conflict.

Colour The history of colour film is exemplary of the ways in which technological innovation is negotiated in different national contexts. British inventors and filmmakers were captivated by its potential to deliver both spectacle and a heightened sense of realism, exploiting different processes and producing films that demonstrated remarkable experimentation and quality. In the silent period the majority of films had colour ‘applied’ by hand‐painting, tinting, and toning or stencil techniques. The work of early film pioneer William Friese‐Greene, particularly his struggles to develop photochemical colour film, was immortalised in The Magic Box ( John Boulting, 1951), a feature film released as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Friese‐Greene’s life is presented as symptomatic of scientific brilliance stymied by the British film industry’s financial problems and the tragic personal consequences of failing to turn a technical breakthrough into a commercial one. Yet Friese‐ Greene’s inventions were part of longer trajectories of trial and error necessitating a re‐framing of his work in the light of subsequent film history. The experiments of William Friese‐Greene were continued by his son Claude in the 1920s to develop an alternative, photochemical film stock‐based colour process that was showcased in films including the cross‐country travelogue The Open Road (1926) at the same time that Technicolor was developing its two‐strip process that was used for an entire feature film, The Black Pirate (Douglas Fairbanks, 1926). The arrival of sound‐on‐film at the end of the 1920s presented technical problems for the tinted films that still dominated the market, and the adoption of panchromatic stock led to a resurgence of black‐and‐white films with their now greater capacities to render subtle tones of grey and light. If colour film was to develop, photochemical processes seemed to point the way forward and during the 1930s there was considerable experimentation by British and American companies to develop commercially viable methods that were aesthetically pleasing. This proved difficult, and even though three‐strip Technicolor emerged by the end of the 1930s as the most marketable process, its expense, cumbersome cameras and the fact that Technicolor controlled equipment and usage, meant that colour films were not the norm for decades. So, unlike the coming of sound, colour did not revolutionise the film industry overnight, and charting the British experience of colour offers fascinating insights into the complex network of issues that accompany the introduction of new technologies. To return to the benefits of thinking about technological history and its impact in terms of being spread across a horizontal landscape, the case of colour certainly

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had key protagonists whose work related to longer, deep‐seated cultural preferences that advocated the pursuit of realism and ‘restrained’ colour as appropriate for British artistic expression. Like sound, it was enmeshed within an internationally competitive economic system that once again saw American technology ­dominate. To learn how to operate Technicolor’s special three‐strip cameras, cinematographers like Jack Cardiff had to be trained and an ingenious ‘imbibition’ printing technique contributed to Technicolor’s unique identity. Cardiff prized himself on introducing experimentation, yet the key influences on his work were part of a longer tradition of crafting cinematography in the style of respected oil painters like Rembrandt or Vermeer (Cardiff 1996, pp. 41, 44). Locating film colour within a respectable trajectory of fine art was beneficial in enhancing its cultural capital. It also paved the way for an appreciation of British colour films as something different, capable of extending Technicolor’s range by also drawing on traditions of landscape painting and of pushing notions of ‘restraint’ in exciting ways (Street 2012b). While there were ideological and cultural reasons for advocating a particularly British approach, the greater costs of shooting in colour additionally required a special economic case to be made which made this a viable option only for major studios and when high box‐office returns were predicted. When Sidney Bernstein added a question about colour to his questionnaire for audiences in 1937 (‘Do you like coloured talkies?’), 62% were in favour of colour film. Ten years later the increased popularity of colour film resulted in 80% of people saying that colour was a reason for going to a film (3% said colour was a reason for staying away, and 17% did not know either way). Colour was a controversial topic for much longer than sound, greeted by some as an exciting development with scope for creating a uniquely British aesthetic, while others feared its impact on audiences accustomed to seeing black‐and‐white films that were frequently praised as being superior. It would appear that each major technological shift was similarly accompanied by intense debate on the current state of the film industry and how it should develop aesthetically. This revealed a fascinating range of opinions that help us to appreciate what was at stake for the various interests concerned, as well as how British cinema was seen to relate to international competition. Hollywood’s Technicolor films were often critiqued as being garish and vulgar, whereas the British press and filmmakers promoted a tastefully restrained national style. In the 1930s, several British processes competed with Technicolor and the one with the highest profile was Dufaycolor, originally French but developed in Britain as a subtle, pastel‐based colour ‘look’ admired by artists such as Paul Nash. Sons of the Sea (Maurice Elvey, 1939), the only feature film made in Dufaycolor, does indeed demonstrate perceptible differences to contemporaneous Technicolor films in terms of its more yellowish shades of green, soft tones, and darkish, maroon rendition of reds. While this palette never offered serious competition to Technicolor, many cultural critics advocated ­similarly subtle, non‐distracting colour tones rather than the bolder, brasher ones associated with Hollywood. This was in many ways a rhetorical position aimed at



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fostering a stronger foothold in a British domestic market dominated by Hollywood whose Technicolor films were actually not always highly‐coloured or ‘distracting’, and whose technicians advised on many British productions (Higgins 2007). Indeed, this nationalist rhetoric in response to international exchange was one of the negotiations that British colour cinema navigated. It also highlights how the meaning of technology is never divorced from contemporaneous perceptions, ideas, fears, and aspirations. Even though British cinema struggled to compete economically with Hollywood, its ‘tasteful’ expression through colour was seen by many to invest it with greater cultural capital. The press book for Jassy (Bernard Knowles, 1947), Gainsborough’s first colour melodrama, accordingly linked the set designs by Maurice Carter directly to a particular approach to colour design which was identified as being specifically British: Gainsborough have used the method which they believe is partly the reason for British Technicolor films proving so much more harmonious than the often more blatant colouring of the Hollywood product. They have made their sets subjective to colouring, in other words they have designed the colouring to blend with the Technicolor itself to bring warmth to pale colours  –  as opposed to the usual Hollywood method of designing vividly coloured sets only to have them brightened again by the normal process of the colour cameras.

British technicians including Jack Cardiff, Ossie Morris, Ronald Neame, and Chris Challis were responsible for producing some remarkable colour films, often enriching approaches developed by dominant companies such as Technicolor, as well as creating their own innovative methods and styles. The contribution of the many British technicians and directors was thus achieved through a complex ­process of negotiating their way through economic, technical, and aesthetic challenges posed by colour in the first half of the twentieth century. What is often referred to as ‘The British School of Technicolor’, exemplified by films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943), This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944), Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945), Blanche Fury (Marc Allégret, 1947), The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948), Saraband for Dead Lovers (Basil Dearden, 1948), The Tales of Hoffmann (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman ( Jack Cardiff, 1950), Moulin Rouge ( John Huston, 1953), and The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955), is actually a diverse range of creative responses to colour. While some of these can be said to derive from preferences for ‘restraint’, they nevertheless deploy colour in distinctive ways that render it far from invisible. Their significance lies less in their perceived opposition to Technicolor as an American company associated with an ‘assertive’ colour aesthetic, and more as exemplars of how to push colour norms within genre filmmaking that were widely admired by professionals writing in craft journals such as American Cinematographer (Street 2012b). So while national sensibilities can be discerned,

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the films are additionally located within a wider, transnational network of technicians, critics, and audiences creating a demand for quality colour films. This came more fully to fruition towards the end of the 1950s when monopack stock ­manufactured by Eastmancolor, an American company, was the market leader. This lowered the cost of making colour films and over the next decades, they became the norm. Subsequent departures, albeit brief, were influenced by intermittent black‐and‐white trends such as the British new wave films of 1958–1963 that demonstrated the persistence of associations between stylistic (as opposed to literal) realism and a monochrome aesthetic, associations that paradoxically held back colour’s development since they were identified with dominant cinematic norms before 1960. The prestigious legacy of the documentary film movement also explains why black‐and‐white cinematography was deemed most appropriate for the British New Wave. But it must be remembered that while these films are normally taken as indicative of British cinema in the early 1960s, they were a small proportion of total production which also featured notable colour films including Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Dr No (Guy Hamilton, 1962), Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963), and Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964). Filming in colour was not restricted to bigger budget films since Eastmancolor provided a vital stylistic signature for the output of Hammer’s horror films such as Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1959) and The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959). These developments foreshadowed the ascendency of colour practices that became further entrenched with the introduction of colour television in 1967.

Widescreen Cinema and 3‐D The tendency to identify new technology with American domination was also evident with widescreen formats in the 1950s that can be connected to the rise of colour as well as to competition from television. Chibnall (2010, p. 149) states that: Academy ratio was perfectly matched to its frequently‐noted characteristics of understatement, intimacy and even introversion. The image of national cinema would be hard to square with the declamatory and expansive nature of CinemaScope, which, conversely, was so perfectly in tune with the international image of Hollywood.

Widescreen was similar to sound in that it was introduced very quickly. While most of the novel processes showcased in the 1950s did not gain ascendancy, Academy ratio films were gradually replaced by wider formats so the logic of the anamorphic revolution was sustained. It did not share the hesitant, longue durée aspects of the introduction of colour that stretched over several decades, so the



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timeframe for debate over widescreen was more concentrated when British studios had to decide whether to convert to Fox’s CinemaScope in 1953. After initial reluctance, even from studios like Hammer that later appreciated how widescreen formats extended opportunities for brazen showmanship, by the end of the decade, about 20% of British films were anamorphic. Production norms were not fundamentally altered by this technological shift, since issues of economy, an increasingly invasive televisual style, and associated performance‐based aesthetic, appeared to tame the threat posed by widescreen to perceived attributes of British national cinema (Chibnall 2010, pp. 158–159). While this verdict might be apposite for the late 1950s, the demise of Academy ratio filmmaking in favour of wider screen formats in the longer term undoubtedly influenced British films in subsequent decades, for example, Panavision used so effectively for Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) and in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). In retrospect, the adoption of wider screen aspect ratios was a highly significant technological change with profound implications for spatial relations on screen (an emphasis on the horizontal), spectator involvement, acting style, mise‐en‐scène, and editing (Belton 1992; Belton et al. 2010). 3‐D cinema is a slightly different story, raising yet more issues concerning locating ‘the national’ within technological innovations that were most fully exploited in America. There was interest in stereoscopic technology from a broad spectrum of early inventors including William Friese‐Greene in Britain and Louis Lumière in France, although the most commercially successful ventures were promoted in America during the 1950s. Like widescreen, the percentage of cinemas that equipped for 3‐D in Britain was relatively small at about 5% during the years 1950–1951 ( Johnston 2011, p. 101). An analysis of the response of British exhibitors, as well as pioneering British companies such as Stereo Techniques that developed 3‐D and advised on stereoscopic films shown in the Telekinema at the Festival of Britain 1951, more broadly in the UK and internationally, qualifies the familiar narrative of 3‐D as an essentially American story of invention, diffusion, and intermittent periods of revival. In 1953, however, particular issues complicated how British exhibitors handled the disruptions necessitated by showing 3‐D films. Whether or not audiences were ambivalent about wearing special Polaroid glasses is not entirely clear, but as the number of 3‐D American feature films increased, exhibitors had to buy more stocks or rent them. Both options put up the price of tickets and therefore the amount of Entertainments Tax paid by exhibitors. The history of 3‐D was also caught up with that of CinemaScope in the sense that the latter seemed to offer a longer‐lasting but less complicated change in screening and viewing practices. In the final analysis, it seems that ‘3‐D simply never convinced enough exhibitors to convert their theatres’ ( Johnston 2011, p. 101). Yet the intermittent revival of interest in 3‐D shows how technologies often reappear during periods of broader medial shifts such as its new lease of life through digital ­formats, the emphasis on high resolution and definition images that offer the ­spectator hyper‐visual experiences.

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Personnel Sound, colour, widescreen, and 3‐D demonstrate the longevity of particular ways of conceptualising British cinema as something that of necessity engages with but must depart from Hollywood. Although the transfer of technology and skills from one country to another is a standard economic operation, its cultural implications ensure that this is seldom without conflict or anxiety. The negotiation of innovation is related to ideas, sensibilities, and cultural responses that extend far beyond technical specificities or perceived economic value. As will already be apparent, this has interesting consequences for how technologies are studied. The contribution of key individuals in developing craft skills has been documented in relation to British cinema: cinematographers by Petrie (1996), editors by Perkins and Stollery (2004), and a large number of technicians through the oral history archive of Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU). While these studies tread closely towards being restricted to documenting the achievements of ‘great men’, they also demonstrate, particularly in the case of cinematographers and editors, how transnational collaboration, the sharing of craft expertise and involvement in co‐productions, gestures towards thinking about their work in terms of being part of a global network. While national inflections are inevitably present in their work, at the same time, a more general pursuit of craft excellence tends to cut across national borders. This perspective is particularly apposite for British technicians since the film industry’s less vertically‐ integrated structure in comparison with Hollywood made them seek interesting and well‐paid freelance work wherever it could be found. All of the major cinematographers involved in developing colour, for example, also worked in Hollywood and on many co‐productions. The first British Technicolor feature film, Wings of the Morning (Harold Schuster, 1937), was to all intents and purposes a co‐production with transnational themes and personnel. Jack Cardiff worked with American cinematographer Ray Rennahan on the film; its director was American; it had British, French, and American actors; some location shooting was in Kerry, Ireland, and its story featured Irish, Canadian, and Spanish characters. The relative marginalisation of technological film history is indicated by the fact that this highly significant colour film is seldom seen and has never been released as a DVD. There were also exchanges of skills, personnel, and equipment between Britain and the rest of Europe in many technical and craft spheres and many celebrated British technicians were émigrés, for example, cinematographer Günther Krampf and set designer Alfred Junge (Bergfelder and Cargnelli 2008). Locating craft labour within transnational themes connects individuals’ contributions to different, productive ways of assessing their impact in Britain and beyond. In their reflection of the common biases, omissions, and repetition of standard accounts, histories of technology can be exclusive of broader labour issues or women’s marginalised involvement in many craft/technical areas (Harper 2000).



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There are dominant protagonists, particularly male cinematographers from Jack Cardiff to Roger Deakins, rightly celebrated respectively for exploring the technical latitude of photochemical film stock and digital colour processes. Yet less credit is given to women such as Natalie Kalmus or Joan Bridge, colour consultants who were influential in the application of Technicolor’s norms in Britain. New technological innovations have both enabled and excluded women, from the reduction of the number of women with non‐acting professional skills when sound films were introduced to their consistently low representation in craft areas, including cinematography and direction. In this way, film history can benefit from extending analyses outwards to encompass contemporaneous developments as well as reflecting on themes diachronically over longer periods (Klinger 1997). This approach has inspired major projects such as Women’s Work in Film and Television, 1933–1989 (Arts and Humanities Research Council 2014–2017) which aim to recover the work of women in film and television over many decades.

Digital Technologies The mass conversion to digital technologies is the latest chapter in this broader narrative of the ways in which innovation is negotiated both within and across economic systems and cultural contexts. The history of digital shares many similarities with the past, although arguably medium specificity has been foregrounded in the transition from analogue to digital in an acute way (Rodowick 2007; Fossatti 2009). In particular, film and television post‐production has been transformed, opening up new ways of creating a film’s ‘look’ after it has been shot and thus shifting the balance of craft skills and equipment in the ‘fixing’ of a film’s chromatic registers from cameras to post‐production computers (Misek 2010). The coming of sound, colour, widescreen, and 3‐D formats certainly invited questions about how film as a medium was developing, and each of them involved changes to its primary physical property: stock. The electronic, data‐ based foundation of digital media, however, represents a fundamental change in the ways in which ‘films’ are made as well as of their materiality. Yet, as many digital theorists have pointed out, in practice, the shift from analogue to digital is intertwined with the persistence of dominant conceptions of what moving images are for, how they interrelate with audiences/users, and how they should look. As Branigan (2006, p. 118) has noted: ‘One should be cautious about focusing too quickly on physical characteristics, technology, and typical operations of a medium at the expense of radial sorts of connections to “older” media. The reality status of a new medium is relative.’ In Britain, digital media have reinforced and challenged aesthetic preferences as well as diversified modes of filmmaking and exhibition. They have impacted on lower‐ budget films by facilitating even greater economy and ability to capture ‘the real’

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in films as varied as Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald, 2003), This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) or simply by making it easier and cheaper to shoot a film. At the higher‐end, US‐UK co‐productions such as blockbusters Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows (David Yates, 2010 and 2011) or Gravity referred to at the beginning of this chapter, have drawn on British expertise in visual effects. The turn to digital is not, however, entirely complete and many filmmakers use it more as a cheaper alternative to analogue equipment than as a means of creating images or narratives that depart from long‐established, conventional norms of filmmaking. This pattern is in keeping with previous technological shifts in which the old co‐exists with the new. Film is still considered to be a reliable, long‐term means of preservation, whereas uncertainties over digital storage have caused concern throughout the film archival community (Fossatti 2009). In production, it seems that what digital can deliver is a product that looks the same but is cheaper. This fundamental driver acts as a limit on its potential for formal experimentation, even though in the area of post‐production this clearly can take place to a major extent and is positively demanded in certain generic contexts. There is also evidence … that digital filmmaking is providing an exciting creative space for many people who would formerly have had limited access to professional, quality image‐making. (Street 2012a, p. 397)

The digital ‘turn’ also needs to be seen as integral to the proliferation of ways in which images are consumed and used ‘horizontally’ across the board from smart phones to IMAX. Unlike previous developments, which invariably required high levels of investment, using digital technologies can be economical, in theory, ­levelling the playing field of international competition. Yet although in theory a feature film can be made on a mobile phone and cheaply made films can circumvent traditional distribution channels by being put on the web immediately, top quality digital cameras are expensive and it is the major studios that can best afford to use them and employ expert digital cinematographers and post‐production ­personnel. The cutting edge of technology tends to be related to the market. As this chapter has aimed to make clear, there are benefits in teasing out expressions and inflections of ‘the national’ within histories of technology. These can be discerned, even celebrated as defiant responses to Hollywood’s hegemony, but the story by no means ends there. British cinema has been affected by major technological changes; how it has responded to these changes tells us much about British cinema at any one time, as well as what critics and audiences wanted it to be. In comparison with Hollywood, British studios were often unable to afford the latest technology, let alone lead the way in its development. Yet the British experience of new technology in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries has been far from passive. As we have seen, film technologies are bound up with ideas about national cinemas, particularly their aesthetics, and what are deemed to be appropriate cinematic expressions in markets subject to product differentiation. The introduction



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of sound and colour in particular provided opportunities to refine a sense of national style around the aural and chromatic elements of British cinema. When a technology has been exported from its country of origin and in spite of attempts to control its application, it is subject to significant adaptation. This transition points to how national responses to technology are never narrowly reactive; ­paradoxically they are rooted in flows of transnational exchange that can be both symbiotic and competitive, typifying over a century of innovation and into the digital revolution.

References Allen, Robert C and Gomery, Douglas (1985). Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Arts and Humanities Research Council (2014) Women’s work in British film and television, 1933–1989. Available at: http://womensfilmandtelevisionhistory.wordpress.com/ 2014/05/09/womens‐work‐in‐british‐film‐and‐television‐1933‐1989 (accessed 3 September 2014). Belton, John (1992). Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Belton, John, Hall, Sheldon, and Neale, Steve (eds.) (2010). Widescreen Worldwide. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey. Bergfelder, Tim and Cargnelli, Christian (eds.) (2008). Destination London: German‐speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–50. Oxford: Berghahn. Bernstein, Sidney (n.d.). Unpublished questionnaires 1937 and 1945–47, British Film Institute Library. Branigan, Edward (1986). Color and cinema: problems in the writing of history. In: The Hollywood Film Industry (ed. Paul Kerr). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Branigan, Edward (2006). Projecting a Camera: Language‐Games in Film Theory. London: Routledge. Buchan, Kit (2014). Creating Gravity. Observer Tech Monthly (9 March). Cardiff, Jack (1996). Magic Hour. London: Faber and Faber. Chibnall, Steve (2010). The scope of their ambition: British independent film production and widescreen formats in the 1950s. In: Widescreen Worldwide (ed. John Belton, Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale), 149–162. New Barnet: John Libbey. Comolli, Jean‐Louis (1971–72). Technique et idéologie. Cahiers du Cinéma 229–241. 6 parts. Fossatti, Giovanna (2009). From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Harper, Sue (2000). Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. New York: Continuum. Higgins, Scott (2007). Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Johnston, Keith M. (ed.) (2011). Now is the time (to put on your glasses): 3‐D film exhibition in Britain, 1951–55. Film History 23 (1): 93–103. Klinger, Barbara (1997). Film history terminable and interminable: recovering the past in reception studies. Screen 38 (2): 107–128.

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Koszarski, Richard (2011). Introduction: art, industry, technology. Film History 23 (1): 3. Misek, Richard (2010). The “look” and how to keep it: cinematography, postproduction and digital colour. Screen 51 (4): 404–409. doi:10.1093/screen/hjq045. Murphy, Robert (1984). The coming of sound to the cinema in Britain. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 4 (2): 143–160. Murphy, Robert (2012). English as she is spoke: the first British talkies. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32 (4): 537–557. doi:10.1080/01439685.2012.727341. O’Brien, Charles (2005). Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the US. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Perkins, Roy and Stollery, Martin (2004). British Film Editors. London: British Film Institute. Petrie, Duncan (1996). The British Cinematographer. London: British Film Institute. Rodowick, David (2007). The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Street, Sarah (2012a). Digital Britain and the spectacle/spectre of new technologies. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 377–399. doi:10.3366/jbct.2012.0096. Street, Sarah (2012b). Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55. London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan. Winston, Brian (1996). Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. London: British Film Institute.

17

Irish Film Industry and Policy Roderick Flynn

Introduction The political economy approach to media industries recalls Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the ‘content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’ (McLuhan 1964, p. 18). An exclusively textual focus on national cinema may obscure industrial and policy contexts which, far from impartially facilitating production, can stamp their impress directly upon cinema texts. Virtually all national film industries benefit in some fashion from state support. Even Hollywood receives direct and indirect assistance from state and federal governments and, in Europe, states have played a vital role in sustaining national cinema industries through the subsidy of production and use of import quotas and tariffs to limit the impact of competition from foreign competition (for which, in the main, read ‘Hollywood’). In Ireland, however, direct state support of an indigenous industry only arrived in the closing decades of the twentieth century and was limited to production subsidies. The idea that space for indigenous productions might be defended on Irish cinema screens was dismissed almost as soon as it was raised in the 1940s. Although film‐ making activity was not unknown in Ireland before the 1970s, the production that did occur was sporadic, often semi‐professional (and very low budget) or undertaken by foreign (mainly UK and US) production companies. As recently as 2004, Ruth Barton could reasonably observe not only that ‘Ireland did not have a film industry until the 1990s’ but the one that emerged subsequently was ‘a very minor one’ (p. 10). Ironically, this absence of support became the focus of Irish film scholarship examining questions of state policy. The ur‐text here (as for so many other areas) A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Cinema and Ireland (Rockett, Gibbons, and Hill 1988) dedicates much of its opening section (written by Kevin Rockett) to delineating a history of the film industry in Ireland and national film policy from the foundation of state up to the mid‐1980s. The main theme of Cinema and Ireland in this regard is the absence of sustained indigenous activity until the 1970s. It took a Hollywood company, Kalem, and its director Sidney Olcott, to produce the first substantial set of fictional images of Ireland between 1910 and 1914. Indigenous film‐making would arrive with the establishment of the Film Company of Ireland in 1916 and later Norman Whitten’s General Film Supply company but neither continued sustained production after the early 1920s. Thereafter indigenous production was sporadic, a result of the will of determined individuals rather than a dedicated infrastructure of cinematic production. Rockett concludes that the limited availability of private capital meant ‘lay and religious commentators interested in promoting a native film industry, looked to the state to establish one’ (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 69). He advances a set of arguments as to why this did not occur. As film was an unpredictable business, already dominated in 1922 by the vertically‐integrated globe‐spanning Hollywood studios, simple pragmatism meant the Irish state was scarcely better resourced than ­indigenous private capital to compete with the US combines. However, invoking the overtly political (i.e. nationalist) nature of some films of the 1910s, he also suggests that the establishment of an independent state obviated the need to exploit cinema’s propagandistic potential. The final nail in the coffin was the inherently conservative nature of the nascent state, which sought to regulate (by definition foreign) cinema via the censorship mechanism established in 1923. Although other factors are mentioned in Cinema and Ireland, in Rockett’s later monograph Irish Film Censorship (Rockett 2004), he firmly locates the origins of that conservatism in the influence of the Catholic middle classes who pushed the state to introduce new film censorship legislation. Arguably, however, censorship was less a film policy than an example of how film was mobilised/suppressed to serve other more immediate political needs of the new state. Taken together with the work of Richard Pine (2002) on early broadcasting, Mike Cronin on sport (2003) and Lionel Pilkington (2001) on theatre, the desire to police cinematic representations may be understood as part of a larger project not merely to prioritise a particularly Gaelic vision of national culture but to ensure that the Irish state could control the dissemination of all and any ideas through the public sphere. In a similar vein, although the state did occasionally support small‐scale film productions up to the 1950s, these interventions were not driven by a clearly articulated policy on film. Rockett notes that the state’s initial interest in production was piqued by ‘its own informational needs’ (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 69). The ‘Early Series’ of files from the Department of Foreign Affairs holdings in the National Archive trace how the Director of Publicity within the Department of External Affairs, Sean Lester, spent the early 1920s agitating for the production of a ‘short propagandist film … for the purpose of reviving and increasing public support’ in



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a state still reeling from the violence of Civil War. Lester was unsuccessful but Rockett notes how pressure from the various arms of the Irish foreign service finally led to the commissioning of the first official documentary, Ireland (1929), an hour‐long mix of tourist and industrial images, which was circulated among Irish embassies and consulates overseas. If Ireland demonstrated the propaganda potential of cinema, it was not until after the Second World War that the state began to commission such material on a regular basis. A 1946 filmed tribute to the leader of the nineteenth‐century Young Ireland group, Thomas Davis, A Nation Once Again, was followed by a number of short drama‐documentaries commissioned by the Department of Health as elements of broader public health campaigns. Film work was also commissioned within the Department of External Affairs under Sean MacBride between 1948 and 1951. Rockett notes that the manifesto of MacBride’s Clann na Poblachta in the 1948 General Election promised to establish a film industry, suggesting that the decision to establish a Cultural Relations Committee (CRC) with a film remit fulfilled that promise. However, the CRC may also be understood as a key element of a broader postwar foreign affairs policy (not least because the initial impetus for the CRC came in 1947 from MacBride’s political opponent, Eamon de Valera). Neutrality had left Ireland politically as well as geographically ‘almost wholly ­isolated from the mainstream of world events and without the means to influence them’ (Keatinge 1973, p. 29). As a result, such policy initiatives involved the state in something akin to ‘an international public relations exercise’ (Keatinge 1973, p. 29). This found expression in Fianna Fail’s decision, in 1947, to invest in a shortwave transmitter that allowed Radio Eireann to broadcast to an international audience and MacBride’s establishment of an Irish News Agency in 1949. In other words, the CRC’s expenditures on short film production were more a subset of a national propaganda project than a standalone effort to develop a film industry. Indeed, the CRC experience demonstrated the need to develop a coherent film policy if the state was to use film more extensively. As the CRC member most committed to film, Liam O’Laoghaire, noted Ireland is coming to play a much more prominent part in the world of international affairs and we require films which will tell the world something about ourselves … Without facilities for Film Production there can be no guarantee of films of quality which will tell Ireland’s story to the world …1

The beginnings of such a policy can be traced to a 1942 report by a small Inter‐ Departmental Committee established in 1938. Cinema and Ireland refers to the report as ‘The Film in National Life’ and tentatively ascribes several policy recommendations (including building a ‘modest National Film Studio’) to it. However, this description was necessarily speculative because, although completed in 1942, the report was never published and only became available through the National Archives in the early years of the twenty‐first century. Flynn (2007b) delineates the

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history and contents of the report. Prompted by a concern that Catholic institutions would fill the vacuum left by the absence of a state film policy, Sean Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, established a committee to explore all aspects of the film industry (putative or actual) in Ireland. The resulting 55‐page report would become an  –  unacknowledged  –  template for state film policy through the 1940s and 1950s. Its far‐sighted identification of the obstacles facing an indigenous production sector – limited domestic market, Hollywood dominance of international distribution – arguably remains valid in the twenty‐first century: a native film industry could never hope to replace to any large extent imported films by native films. Apart from an occasional full‐length film, its scope would be restricted to the production of short films and to films for education, industrial, agricultural, tourist and general propaganda purposes. Its prospects of ever becoming self‐supporting would depend on the extent to which a foreign market could be secured, and while this would depend to some degree on the quality, artistic merit and general appeal of the productions, other obstacles in the way are so great that it would be wise in considering the question of the establishment of a small‐scale film industry to proceed on the assumption that its products would seldom procure ­exhibition outside the country. The greater portion of the cost of films produced in this country would in these circumstances have to be met from public funds. (Department of Industry and Commerce 1942, p. 25)

In the financially conservative Ireland of the 1940s, the conclusion that state funding was necessary effectively ruled out the pursuit of any active policy to establish an indigenous production industry. The report also dismissed the notionally cost‐ neutral idea of imposing screen quotas for Irish‐made films primarily on the grounds that ‘the initial output of a native film industry would not be sufficient to fulfil it’ (Department of Industry and Commerce 1942, p. 22). However, the committee was also clearly conscious of the risks of alienating Hollywood distributors operating in Dublin, raising the prospect that any Irish state action undermining the position of the former might be met by retaliation such as a withholding of film supplies. Though clearly disappointed at these conclusions, Lemass was prompted to reframe his thinking: if an Irish film industry was not viable, then what about a film industry in Ireland driven by foreign investment? In 1943, Laurence Olivier had come to the Curragh to stage the Battle of Agincourt with the assistance of the Irish Defence Forces for his adaptation of Henry V. Lemass had been impressed by the estimated £100 000 the nine‐week production had invested in the Irish economy. Furthermore, by 1946, even before the proliferation of Hollywood ­runaway productions in postwar Europe, the arrival of several other UK‐based productions in Ireland for location shoots, plus the promise that Walt Disney was coming ‘to make a film in Ireland about “the little people”’ (Anon 1946), encouraged Lemass to consider how international production in Ireland might be ­encouraged. In 1946, Lemass proposed to establish an Irish film studio on a scale far exceeding the needs of a putative indigenous industry. Although such a studio



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would ‘be available for productions by native concerns’, Lemass noted that it was ‘primarily intended for the production of long films’.2 Explicitly referring to ‘British and American organisations’ as clients, Lemass stressed that the studio while suitable for the production of short films mainly by native enterprise, would also be capable of accommodating productions on a larger scale, undertaken mainly by foreign enterprises in the initial stage and later by domestic concerns … (Anon 1946)

Lemass’s cabinet colleagues (and in particular Minister for Finance, Frank Aitken) were unconvinced by Lemass’s projections of overseas interest and refused to ­contemplate funding infrastructure that was not designed for a notional indigenous industry. As early as 1946, then, the issue of state support for film production was framed in terms of national culture versus international capital, a faultline that is still central to Irish film policy debates. Though thwarted, Lemass was not defeated. As Flynn (2005) has indicated, he would sporadically return to the idea of developing a film industry through the 1950s, at one point mooting the establishment of a national film board as a stepping stone towards building a studio. During his last stint as Minister for Industry and Commerce between 1957 and 1959, Lemass finally realised his studio ­ambitions, albeit through proxies. In 1957, theatrical impresario Louis Elliman, Abbey Chairman Ernest Blythe, and film producer Emmet Dalton purchased Ardmore House and Estate in Bray, Co. Wicklow, with a view to building a film studio. Although Industry and Commerce archive documents are silent on the matter, the vast bulk of the capital required for building the actual studios was  provided by two creatures of Lemass’s Department of Industry and Commerce  –  the Industrial Development Authority and the Industrial Credit Corporation. In his book on the connections between the Irish stage and screen, Ireland’s Theatre on Film, Barry Monahan’s (2009) extensive exploration of the Abbey Theatre archives appears to confirm the decisive role of Lemass’s Department in facilitating the building of the studios. Notwithstanding Louis Elliman’s insistence that everything shot at Ardmore would be set in Ireland or written by an Irish screenwriter (Anon 1957), in practice, Ardmore relied almost exclusively upon international productions until the 1990s. Although the first half‐dozen Ardmore productions were adaptations of Irish content (Abbey Theatre plays), they were produced by UK‐based companies using a UK production subsidy (the Eady levy). The potential pitfalls of devising a  film policy dependent on external international investment were quickly demonstrated. As early as 1952, the Department of External Affairs had ­ expressed concern regarding the potentially negative fallout from The Quiet Man’s stereotype‐ridden representation of Ireland (Flynn 2009). Some of the early Abbey adaptations were scarcely an improvement: the stage Irishry of Sally’s Irish Rogue (1958), for example, clearly suggested that the primary audience envisaged for the film lay beyond Irish borders. However, the reliance upon international capital

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also had – unexpected and negative – consequences for Irish employment in the new industry. UK‐based film unions  –  most notably the Electrical Trades Union – insisted that UK‐funded productions at Ardmore give preference to British crews, threatening to boycott UK producers who failed to do so. Fairly or otherwise, the name ‘Ardmore’ quickly became associated with labour difficulties, ­discouraging international producers from shooting there. In response, the Industrial Credit Corporation created a subsidiary, the Irish Film Finance Corporation, to advance production funding to productions using Ardmore Studios. However, even the £365 000 advanced between 1960 and 1962 failed to attract a sufficient throughput of activity. Though Ardmore continued to tick over through the 1960s and 1970s, it rarely operated in the black. It also became clear that the assumption that Ardmore’s existence alone would spontaneously generate an indigenous industry in its wake was mistaken. In 1967, the Irish film editor and documentarist, Louis Marcus, wrote a series of articles in the Irish Times, decrying the irrelevance of Ardmore to an indigenous industry. Rockett (Rockett et al. 1988) and Flynn and O’Connell (2010) outline how these writings caught the attention of the Hollywood director John Huston, who had been domiciled in Ireland since 1953 and who had become an Irish citizen in January 1964. In a highly choreographed meeting on the set of Huston’s 1967 production, Sinful Davey, Huston publicly drew the attention of Taoiseach Jack Lynch to the prospects of an indigenous industry, implicitly critiquing the previous focus on overseas productions. Lynch responded by inviting Huston to head a committee (ultimately constituted by 21 individuals connected to various aspects of cinema in Ireland) to investigate how an indigenous industry might be developed. In the event, Huston found himself at odds with the direction taken by the rest of the committee. Huston had apparently envisaged the creation of a mechanism whereby the Irish state would support productions by small‐scale independent (and, in all likelihood, US‐based) production companies which were, nonetheless, still tied to the major US distributors. By contrast, most of the committee favoured creating a Film Board to fund nascent Irish film talent in making short films and ultra‐low‐budget feature productions. Though sceptical of this stepping‐stone approach, Huston was at least partly mollified by the committee’s recommendation that a Film Board would also provide development funding for larger‐scale international projects. He accepted the majority will and threw his influence behind the resulting report which was delivered to the Minister for Industry and Commerce, George Colley, in summer 1968. In a striking reversal of previous appeals to industrial rationales, the Report primarily justified state support on cultural grounds: The decision whether to provide government backing for an industry is usually taken by reference to the amount and type of employment the industry will give, the contribution it will make to the nation’s economy and the likelihood that it will endure … but we realised our task involved more than this measurement …



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In considering … whether a native film industry should be established, we took into account … that, in the absence of a native film industry, we lack a potent means of presenting Ireland, its heritage and its people to the world and of keeping the Irish people in touch with their distinctive environment. (Film Industry Committee 1967, p. 10)

Colley appears to have accepted the committee’s recommendations (and their underlying rationale) without demur and transposed them en bloc into the Film Bill of 1970. However, as Rockett points out, entirely unconnected political machinations meant that the 1970 Film Bill never received a second parliamentary reading and lapsed at the next election in 1973. It was assumed that the new Fine Gael/Labour administration would revive the 1970 Bill: the new Minister for Industry and Commerce, Justin Keating, explicitly promised this in early 1973. However, in 1973, Ardmore Studios, and more pointedly its acres of land, were put up for auction, the studios having again entered receivership in 1972. Confronted with the possibility that the most significant piece of film‐making infrastructure in the country would be redeveloped for housing, Keating instructed Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) to acquire the studios for the state. Having spent £IR457 000 acquiring the studios, the state had little appetite (or funding) for a parallel investment in a Film Board. Maintaining Ardmore became the de facto centrepiece of 1970s film policy, a point emphasised by the relaunch of the studios as a semi‐state body, the National Film Studios of Ireland (NFSI) in 1975. Despite receiving an extravagant make‐over, the ‘new’ facility continued to struggle though the 1970s and 1980s: high‐profile shoots such as Zardoz, Excalibur, and Remington Steele could not keep the sound stages filled. Nonetheless, some state support for indigenous cinema did begin to emerge in the 1970s via the Arts Council of Ireland. When established in 1951, the Council was depicted as a bulwark against the corrupting forces of popular culture in ­general and cinema in particular. However, as Ted Sheehy (2003) notes, during the passage of a new Arts Bill in 1973, Labour Senator Mary Robinson’s suggestion that film might be added to the Council’s purview (and thus officially elevated to the status of ‘art form’) was unproblematically accepted. As a consequence, from 1975 onwards, the Council funded overtly cultural cinema via a Script Competition co‐funded with RTÉ, leading to the production of at least one sub‐feature length (typically 60  minutes in duration) film production each year from 1977. Subsequently labelled the ‘First Wave’ of indigenous cinema, this work created a key context in which the first Irish Film Board would operate. The creation of the Film Board was an unintended consequence of attempts to deal with the ongoing problem of Ardmore. In 1977, the new Minister for Industry and Commerce, Des O’Malley commissioned the London office of US consulting firm Arthur D. Little to identify whether Ardmore could be made financially viable. Although unimpressed by the NFSI’s commercial nous, the consultants acknowledged that the studios were hindered by factors beyond their immediate

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control. Key among these was the absence from Ireland of the kind of state‐funded financial incentives for film‐making common in other European nations. Cinema and Ireland erroneously (but understandably in the absence of state documents) cites the report as recommending the establishment of an independent Film Board with a fund of £4.1 million. In fact the consultants recommended a fund of just £2.8 million to be disbursed over four years to incentivise foreign producers to shoot at Ardmore. The NFSI expressed interest in administering such a fund but was rebuffed by Industry and Commerce which noted of the NFSI that ‘where there are no prospects of alternative projects the need to utilise the studio space seems to overwhelm commercial and financial caution’.3 Thus the Department recommended creating a new independent body to administer the fund. Des O’Malley added a coda of his own to these recommendations: an additional £1.3 million should be ring‐fenced for indigenous productions, whether shot at the NFSI or not. Precisely what prompted this addendum is unclear.4 However, O’Malley made it clear that it would be politically difficult to continue supporting the NFSI without also making some gesture towards indigenous film‐ makers. By the late 1970s, those individuals who had come up through the grades on o ­ verseas productions, state‐sponsored films or the increasingly significant filmed commercials sector, were increasingly organised, under the auspices of the Irish Film and Television Guild and the Association of Independent Producers of Ireland. The records of the Guild (held by the Irish Film Archive) point to ­persistent lobbying from 1975 aimed at encouraging successive Ministers at Industry and Commerce to enact the 1970 Film Bill. Thus it seems likely that O’Malley was, at least in part, responding to that pressure. Nonetheless it is important to emphasise that the framing of the 1980 Film Board Bill was ­primarily aimed at an industrial objective  –  facilitating the ongoing use of Ardmore by international ­productions  –  with support for indigenous work as a secondary consideration. In this regard, it worth recalling the extent to which, by the 1970s, policy‐ makers had internalised the assumption that the Irish economy was in a dependent relationship with employment‐providing corporations from overseas (and, in particular, from the US). This default position was simply extended to the arena of film policy. Indeed, during the framing of the 1980 Bill, doubts expressed as to whether Ireland’s membership of the European Economic Community would permit ring‐fencing of funds for indigenous producers, perhaps inadvertently further entrenched the  assumption that Irish film policy would encourage foreign direct investment. The final draft of the Irish Film Board Bill made no reference to the £2.8 million/£1.3 million split or to funds being conditional on shooting at Ardmore. In language which echoed Lemass’s thinking in the 1940s, Section  4 of the Bill simply stated that ‘the Board shall assist and encourage by any means it considers appropriate the making of films in the  State and the development of an industry in the State for the making of films’ while Section 10 limited the Board’s total expenditure to £4.1 million.



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The Bill’s acknowledgement of the Board’s national obligations were, as Rockett notes, limited to an acknowledgement of ‘the need for the expression of national culture’ through film (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 118). Though the Bill passed a final reading in December 1980, Des O’Malley was no longer Minister when the Board was formally established in July 1981. Despite the earlier emphasis on shoring up Ardmore, productions supported by the Board ­between 1981 and 1987 made scant use of the studios. In part, this was influenced by the 1982 decision to wind up the NFSI (although the studios themselves remained operational). However, the Board also appears to have been genuinely unaware of the Arthur D. Little recommendations relating to Ardmore. Once established, the state allowed the Board considerable latitude in how it interpreted its role. As Irish Film Board (IFB) Chief Executive Michael Algar put it, ‘[b]y and large the Board invented its own policies’.5 Given this blank slate, the Board unilaterally interpreted its primary role as being to support indigenous production. This did not necessarily mean a preference for avant‐garde/arthouse material. However, the obvious candidates for support included those film‐makers who had benefited from Arts Council support since 1975, i.e. directors like Neil Jordan, Bob Quinn, Joe Comerford, and Kieran Hickey. As a result, the Board’s support of work that might, in some cases, be characterised as adopting a ‘third cinema’ aesthetic model, reflected the nature of the majority of projects placed in front of it rather than any overt commissioning policy. According to Algar, there were ‘few, if any, transparently commercial projects coming from Irish film‐makers’.6 Thus an institution originally established to channel money towards international productions at Ardmore ended up concentrating virtually all its production funding on indigenous, locally‐engaged production. However, these activities halted abruptly in June 1987. The February 1987 General Election inaugurated a Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat government which embarked upon public expenditure cuts designed to rein in the burgeoning national debt. In a context where education and health spending was subject to swingeing cuts, the Irish Film Board made an easy target, even if its annual running costs were negligible. The sudden closure prompted murmurings that the state was unhappy with the critical nature of the representations offered by Board‐supported work. However, those who actually worked on the first Board report almost no political interference (indeed virtually no political engagement at all) during their tenure.7 The official reason was far less prosaic. Addressing the Seanad in July 1987, Minister for State at Foreign Affairs Sean Calleary had noted: The fact is that only £67,000 has so far been repaid to the board of the approximate £2 million advanced as loans, not grants, and that the board have a policy of writing off each year 50 per cent of the token value of their loans … To be serious and ­realistic, we must take cognisance of the fact that the film industry must be put on a commercial basis.8

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This implication of the government’s economic programme had been trialled immediately before the closure of the Board. A week earlier, the Minister for Finance, Ray MacSharry, announced the introduction of a new tax incentive – Section 35 – allowing corporations to write off investments in film ­production against corporation tax. The Board had lobbied for such an incentive since December 1982 and greeted Section 35 with enthusiasm on the assumption that it would complement the Board’s activities, rather than constituting its replacement. For the indigenous industry, the removal of the Board was t­ raumatic. However, as the shock faded, there was also a recognition that state policy had lurched in a corporate‐funded, tax incentive‐based direction. The account of film policy in Cinema and Ireland ceases just before the closure of the Board. But in the six years between the closure and the changes to Irish film policy introduced in 1993, a sea‐change occurred. An emphasis on the ‘commercial’ as a prerequisite for state support would become part of the DNA of film policy and the domestic industry from the 1990s onwards. The legislative and institutional innovations expressing this change were so significant and far‐reaching that even textually‐focused academic work could hardly ignore them. Thus Ruth Barton’s Irish National Cinema devotes a short chapter (‘The Second Film Board Years’) to tracing the impact of a succession of Ministers for Arts and Finance on the fortunes of the Irish film industry (Barton 2004, pp. 104–112). McLoone also emphasises the significance of the post‐1993 changes, citing Rockett’s 1996 description of the period as constituting the most ‘concentrated period of change ever for Irish film culture’ and expressing his concern that the post‐1993 wave of films were compromised by their increasingly commercial nature (McLoone 2000, citing Rockett, 1996, p. 115). The proximate driver of the 1993 changes was the arrival of a historically unprecedented coalition between Fianna Fail and the Labour Party. Although Labour were technically the junior partner, the programme for Partnership Government largely reflected their election manifesto. This included the establishment of a new Department of Culture, the first in the history of the state. Thus responsibility for film policy, which had moved from Industry and Commerce to a Junior Ministry within the Department of the Taoiseach in 1986, shifted again to the new Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, presided over by Labour TD Michael D. Higgins. A sociologist and published poet as well as a ­politician, Higgins might have been expected to implement a policy driven mainly by a cultural logic. In practice, Higgins had to operate within the logic of the industrial discourse expressed in three 1992 reports on the Irish audio‐visual sector: the Coopers and Lybrand Report, the Independent Television Production Sector Report, and the Report of the Special Working Group on the Film Production Industry. All three acknowledged the cultural dimension of audio‐ visual production but their calls to support the Irish audio‐visual sector were primarily couched in hard‐nosed commercial language. The Coopers and Lybrand Report argued both that the first Film Board’s funding decisions had not



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been driven by commercial considerations and that it had demonstrated a poor grasp of international film sales and distribution. The Special Working Group, which included a number of film directors and producers, was equally critical, noting the Department of Finance view that the film industry should not receive  preferential treatment on the basis of ‘ill‐defined cultural or artistic ­characteristics’. All three reports then called for a much more market‐driven approach to the sector. The reports emphasised that, internationally, the industry was at a turning point. New cable and satellite technologies, coupled with the deregulation of European broadcast markets, promised a deluge of new television stations hungry for screen content. The European Commission had expressed concern that this demand might be fulfilled by US‐based content providers but – with state support – the reports suggested that Irish audio‐visual industry could compete with Hollywood by hugely expanding its output and retaining key copyrights associated with that content. By implication, such content would be commercial in character, becoming a form of national cinema that, in Croft’s words, ‘vies more directly with Hollywood’ (2006, p. 49). Crucially, the reports also stressed the importance of fully capturing the economic impact of the audio‐visual industry in order to avoid the narrow political focus on the direct return of film investments measured through loan recoupment. In the immediate aftermath of the Board ­closure in 1987, Muiris Mac Conghaile, the former Chair of the Board, had argued not only that the £IR1.2 million advanced by the Board had kick‐ started work with a total budget of £IR6.1 million but that this had generated direct and indirect tax revenue well in excess of the Board’s initial loans. The 1992 reports developed econometric models informed by this logic which measured the ­multiplier impact of film expenditure on the broader economy. Taken together, they argued that audio‐visual production should be supported because it made economic sense for Ireland Inc. As Minister, Higgins initially moved cautiously, expressing hope of having structures in place ‘to promote a vibrant film industry’ by 1996. However, in March 1993, he astutely exploited Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game Oscar success by immediately reviving the Film Board with a £IR1.5 million budget for its first year. Within a week, he had appointed Lelia Doolan, ex‐RTÉ and independent film producer as Chair, an appointment warmly welcomed by the Irish filmmaking community as bringing a mix of cultural sensitivity and financial pragmatism to the position. By September, the other key appointment – Chief Executive Rod Stoneman – was completed. With a background in the UK’s Channel 4, Stoneman advocated a philosophy of ‘radical pluralism’, arguing that the only possible means of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of Irish cinema while watching the commercial bottom line, was to support production of the greatest possible variety of films. This increased the chances of capturing the public imagination (and thus ­achieving commercial success) without employing Hollywood‐ scale production and marketing resources.

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However, it was a less‐heralded innovation, which would arguably exert a greater long‐term impact. The 1992 reports had all agreed on the need to ‘streamline’ the Section 35 tax incentive. Doubtless influenced by Higgins, Minister for Finance Bertie Ahern introduced two key amendments to the section in the April 1993 Finance Act, extending it to projects where as little as 10% of the actual production occurred in Ireland and permitting private individuals to avail themselves of it. Rarely has a policy initiative been followed by such a ringing practical endorsement. Just three indigenous features were made in 1991 and 1992 while the combined value of all – indigenous and off‐shore – productions shot between 1987 and 1991 was £IR52.638 million. The aggregate value of 1993 activity alone was £IR50.5 million. This rose to £IR133.1 million and £IR100.1 million respectively in 1994 and 1995. It had taken the first Board six years to support 10 films: the second reached that figure in 12 months. Growth continued through the 1990s, peaking in 2003 when the combined value of film and television activity reached €320 million. By the late 1990s, the Board was supporting an average of seven to nine productions each year, and the equivalent of between 1300 and 1600 full‐time jobs were created across the sector. Overseas productions accounted for an unanticipated proportion of this new activity. In July 1994, the $US70 million production of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart arrived in Ireland, having left Scotland mid‐shoot after experiencing difficulty in securing sufficient extras for the massive battle scenes. Working via Irish producer Morgan O’Sullivan, the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht promised the production access to Section 35 funding but also to 1600 reservist soldiers as extras. The message that Ireland was open for business as a filming location was not lost on overseas producers: the next decade saw a series of overseas productions come to Ireland.9 This was in no small part encouraged by the nature of the key Section  35 investment vehicle. Such investments were notionally subject to risk: hence the need to offer investors a significant tax break incentive to make the investment in the first place. In practice, however, investors sought security for their investment such as an assurance that projects already had distribution presale agreements in place. In practice, this meant Section 35 funding tended to flow to projects with demonstrable commercial prospects. Irish producers quickly learned that third cinema‐style work was unlikely to attract such funding. By contrast, Hollywood‐backed projects which came with built‐in distribution guarantees secured a volume of Section 35 disproportionate to their absolute numbers. The scale of state funding via the Film Board and, in particular, the large volume of tax foregone as a result of the unanticipated enthusiasm of private investors for Section  35 raised questions as to whether  –  upsurge in activity ­notwithstanding – the state was getting value for money.10 Higgins continued to stress the dual nature of the sector: There are two sides to all this activity. The first relates to fostering of art and culture  … The development of the Irish film industry provides us with the ­opportunity to tell our own story, to share our creativity, culture and imagination



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with the international audience through the medium of film. We can communicate directly with millions of people and educate them about ourselves. The second side is the fact that film is an industry. It must meet the testing ­requirements of the market place. And when the State is making very substantial investments in the industry by way of an attractive package of incentives, the question has to be asked ‘Is the taxpayer getting value for money?’.11

The answer came via annual reports on the economic impact of film production from the Audiovisual Federation of the Irish Business and Employer’s Confederation (IBEC 1995–2012). Launched with Higgins’s imprimatur, the reports appeared to demonstrate that the economic activity consistently resulted in a net return on the state’s investment. Given this, the position of both the Film Board and Section 35 remained secure throughout the 1990s, surviving even Michael D. Higgins’ departure from office in 1997. The increase in the levels of indigenous production, however, did not necessarily translate into popular success. The initial focus of the Board (and most of the producers they funded) was on production with considerations of distribution and marketing usually left until after the final cut. Indigenous productions found it difficult to access both international and domestic distribution. In August 1999, the report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group stressed the need to develop stronger indigenous production companies characterised by greater scale, capitalisation, business acumen, and editorial ­ ­expertise which could successfully compete in the international market. In any case, by the start of the twenty‐first century, it was becoming abundantly clear that film policy formation was increasingly influenced by the need to maintain the position Ireland had established within what Toby Miller and his co‐authors (2001) have termed the new international division of cultural labour. In December 2002, the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy announced his intention to remove the film tax incentive on the grounds that a film industry had now been established. The ensuing Screen Producers Ireland‐led campaign to retain the incentive successfully argued that the infant industry rationale for Section 35 had been superseded by its role as a key weapon in the Irish arsenal when competing against other countries for footloose foreign productions. Indigenous production was not referred to except to suggest that local activity was only viable because of cross‐subsidies from exchequer returns generated by international productions. Screen Producers Ireland (SPI) cited the 2003 PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report which concluded that only films costing in excess of £IR5 million returned a net benefit to the exchequer. Thus, it argued that ‘off‐shore productions are more likely to make a positive return to the Irish exchequer than their often less well‐ resourced indigenous counterparts or co‐productions’ (PWC 2003, p. 35). SPI drew out the implications for indigenous productions: Even in countries with relatively large domestic markets … the commercial viability of their domestic industry is only possible by accessing significant Government support and using the financial benefits flowing from international productions to support local productions.12

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That the body which in an earlier incarnation (Film Makers Ireland 1992) had stressed the potential of indigenous content producers should characterise the latter as dependent on overseas productions spoke volumes about the transformation of the industry in the intervening period. In any case, the following years demonstrated both the precarity of reliance upon inward investment in an industry characterised by serial production and the relative impotence of individual nation states engaged in such international competition for capital. Although Section 35, coupled with the willingness of the state to facilitate productions, was important, exogenous factors played a crucial role in attracting inward investment. For example, although the UK and Ireland competed for footloose productions, the manner in which the main UK film tax incentives in the 1990s were structured allowed foreign producers to simultaneously avail of both UK and Irish tax incentives. By moving to London for post‐­production after completing principal photography in Ireland, King Arthur (2003) was able to raise nearly a quarter of its $100 millon budget via UK and Irish soft funding. The Count of Monte Cristo, Reign of Fire, Ella Enchanted, and Veronica Guerin (all co‐productions with US majors or their satellites) also availed themselves of both Section 481 and UK incentives (Figure 17.1).13 International exchange rates also played a key role. Between 1996 and 2001, the value of the dollar against the punt increased by more than 60%, encouraging a surge of US expenditure on screen production in Ireland from €10 million in 1996 to €93.8 million by 2001. However, in early 2004, the UK incentives were radically restructured: projects availing themselves of the replacement incentives would now have to spend at least 40% of their budget within the UK. Matters worsened as the euro began to strengthen against the dollar: by 2005, it had become 30% more expensive for Hollywood companies to shoot in Ireland than four years earlier and US spend in  Ireland collapsed. This impacted on overall turnover and employment.

Figure 17.1  Co‐production and tax incentives: Veronica Guerin (2003).



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The total value of audio‐visual activity in Ireland fell to €152 million in 2005 (its lowest level in nearly a decade) while employment fell to 1053, a huge decline from the 1700 peak recorded five years earlier in 2000. The Irish state’s response confirmed the overseas orientation of the industry. In addition to tweaking Section 481 to allow individual productions to access larger sums (first €35 million, then €50 million), the Film Board, which hitherto had focused on indigenous production, was now directed to consider international production too. In July 2005, the Board announced that the marketing department would henceforth concentrate exclusively on attracting inward production. ‘Other marketing requirements’ (i.e. those related to selling indigenous productions) would be outsourced as and when needed. In October 2005, a new Board‐administered international production fund was announced ‘targeted at high‐quality international production that can demonstrate a strong connection to Ireland’.14 ‘Connection’, in this case, had nothing to do with textual content: the first recipients of funding were Showtime’s The Tudors, a Granada Television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Channel 5’s Kitchen, set in a Scottish restaurant. Despite the crisis of 2004–2005, overall output picked up in the second half of the decade averaging around €250 million per annum. However, this disguised a shift towards large‐scale television production which by 2007 accounted for three‐ quarters of all audio‐visual activity in Ireland. The indigenous animation sector also expanded, outstripping the value of feature production in 2005 and again in 2007. The rise in television resulted from careful cultivation of new US cable channels by Irish production companies. However, it also benefitted from the fact that, unlike tax incentives in most competing jurisdictions, Section 35 funding could be applied to television production. The Tudors was followed in rapid succession by Camelot, Penny Dreadful (both Showtime), and Vikings (for the History Channel). Other European broadcasters followed the US lead and, by 2010, independent ­television production accounted for €241.5 million of the total Irish audio‐visual sector turnover of €387 million. Indeed, the audio‐visual sector was almost unique in bucking the trend of the rest of the economy. As the rest of the economy went into freefall after 2008, the audio‐visual sector, buoyed by international production, continued to post healthy results. Nonetheless, the crash did impact upon the industry, the Board, and Section  35. The Board saw its capital funding nearly halved between 2008 and 2015, falling from €20 million to €11.2 million. In a bid to find alternate sources of funding, the late 2000s saw the Board invest small sums in a large number of European co‐productions originating outside Ireland. Although this has given a distinctly cosmopolitan look to the Board’s output, it is not obvious that it has generated reciprocal funding from other national film bodies. As for Section 35, the fact that the scheme overwhelming benefitted high net worth private investors (74% of those who availed themselves of the scheme in 2010 earned in excess of €100 000) became politically untenable in an era where the brunt of austerity was borne by those at the other end of the income scale. Thus, as part of the 2013

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Budget, the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, announced that, though extending the film tax relief scheme to 2020, it would move to a tax credit model in 2016. This drew protest from Irish producers: Section  35 funding had been available at the start of filming to cash‐flow local productions (a role the Irish banking sector was no longer able to play). Henceforth, financial relief via tax credits could not be accessed until the end of the tax year. Strikingly, it was acknowledged that this would be less problematic for international productions, supported by large‐scale media groups. In other words, the overall support structure was again tweaked in favour of overseas productions. What kind of cinema then has Irish screen policy encouraged? It is important to acknowledge that policy has had an influence. Taken together, the ongoing publication of reviews of and reports on the Irish film industry in the 1990s ­suggested that if the first Film Board had been largely left to its own devices, the second incarnation was profoundly conscious of the watchful eye of the state. Writers like Rockett and McLoone have asserted that in a bid to produce a more commercial industry, the critically‐engaged, culturally‐specific cinema of the ‘First Wave’ was replaced by a cinema which (in McLoone’s words) ‘inhabits some ill‐defined space between the particular and the universal, between essentialist irrelevance and global insignificance’ (McLoone 2006). The sheer scale of output since 1993 makes it difficult to arrive at objective conclusions in this regard: the Board contributed to the production of nearly 250 feature films between 1993 and 2015 (not to mention a plethora of shorts, documentaries, animations, and so on). Flynn and Tracy (2016) have attempted to assess quantitatively the nature of the Board’s output since 1993 and test empirically the claims made by Rockett and McLoone but the findings remain tentative. Nonetheless, they do indicate a much greater prominence of conventional dramatic narratives, set in modern, urban locations – in other words, films with formal characteristics that may be easier to sell to an international audience than the intensely localised work of the 1980s. In a similar vein, the findings reveal a significant increase in Board support for both overtly generic (horror and sc‐fi) films and for films which entirely eschew signifiers of Ireland or Irishness (Flynn and Tracy 2016). In this respect, it might be argued that Irish cinema has been characterised by transnational production modes from its inception (insofar as it was dominated by international productions shot in Ireland). However, since 1993, encouraged by both the market‐driven nature of the Section  35 production incentive and, since 2004, the increasingly market‐driven nature of the Irish Film Board (now Screen Ireland), Irish cinema has also increasingly adopted transnational modes of narration. In his survey of modes of national cinema, Crofts points to the extent to which Anglophone nations – the UK, Canada and Australia – have, in seeking to produce work which can succeed with US audiences, imitated Hollywood. Crofts also highlights the dangers inherent in such an approach: ‘A fantasy of a foreign market can, then, exercise an inordinate influence over “national” product’ (2006, p. 51). This may encourage filmmakers to tweak notionally Irish films to accommodate the expectations of US audiences to the extent that their cultural specificity disappears.



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Despite the Irish Film Board’s increasingly constrained resources, indigenous production continues not least because the more commercial and outward‐looking nature of local productions has left Irish production companies less reliant on local funding sources than hitherto. The growing international reputations of Irish film‐makers who have been able to develop their craft over a number of films is also important. Lenny Abrahamson’s and Paddy Breathnach’s respective films Room (2015) and Viva (2015) represent their fifth feature outings. However, although these are Irish‐originated projects, they bear little in the way of Irish textual markers: Viva is set in Cuba and shot in Spanish. Room is set in the US with a US cast. Even Abrahamson’s previous film Frank (2014), though starring two Irish actors – Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson – cast them as American and British respectively. By contrast, John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard (2011) and Calvary (2013) were definitively set in Ireland with (mainly) Irish casts but it is open to question as to how much their international commercial success was indebted to both films’ propensity to trade in modern Irish stereotypes. For some decades the Irish economy has been one of the most open in the world: foreign‐owned firms accounted for nearly 60% of Gross Value Added within the Irish ‘business economy’ in 2011 (Department of Finance 2014, p. 2). This external dominance is mirrored in the audio‐visual sector in Ireland and limits the agency of the state when devising policies for that sector. The obstacles of the twenty‐first century essentially remain those identified in 1942 – a small domestic market necessitates accessing an international market which, new online distribution technologies notwithstanding, remains dominated by US media giants. Though the policy innovations of 1993 sought to create a strong and independent indigenous industry, in practice, the industry and the state have had to accommodate themselves to the logic of international media capital. To date, on a purely financial level, both have done so quite successfully, but ultimately their future remains dependent on the vagaries of decisions made outside Ireland.

Notes 1 Liam O’Laoghaire, ‘Brief Memo on the Film Situation in Eire’. Circulated to ACCR Sub‐ Committee on Films, c. June 1949. See National Archive of Ireland (NAI) DFA 438/35, ‘Memo re: film situation in Ireland and possibilities of film production 1949–52’. 2 Department of Industry and Commerce, ‘Memorandum for the Government: Proposals for the establishment of a National Film Studio’, 30 November 1946, National Archive of Ireland (NAI) S 13838. 3 ‘Proposals for the development of the Film Industry in Ireland’, December 1978, 18, NAI 2009/135/68. 4 The author interviewed Mr. O’Malley on precisely this question in summer 2013 but the former minister conceded that he simply could not recall the decision or its rationale. 5 Personal interview, 6 March 2006.

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6 Personal interview, 6 March 2006. 7 Based on interviews with Tiernan MacBride (IFB Board member 1982–1987) and Michael Algar (IFB Chief Executive 1982–1987). 8 Seanad Éireann Debates, Vol. 116, 14 July 1987, 2343. 9 Early in 1996, Higgins added an additional condition to Section  35 certification requiring that the end credits of the production state that the production was ‘filmed on location in Ireland’. This was in part due to some confusion on the part of overseas audiences as to where Braveheart – which is set in Scotland – was actually filmed. 10 By 1999, the Board had received a direct grant of £IR8.2 million while over £IR60 ­million was raised through Section 35. 11 Michael D. Higgins, ‘Economic Impact of Film Production in Ireland’ Address at the offices of IBEC, 23 February 1995. 12 Screen Producers Ireland (2003), Realising the Potential of the Irish Film and Television Industry – A Unique National Asset, 34. 13 See http://www.world2000.ie/service/services.html (accessed 4 September 2006). 14 See http://www.filmboard.ie/guidelines.php?type=g&id=14. (accessed 12 September 2006).

References Anon. (1946). ‘Luring the leprechaun’. Irish Times (29 July), p. 5. Anon. (1957). ‘An Irish film industry’. Evening Herald (8 August). Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Coopers and Lybrand (1992). Report on the Indigeneous Audiovisual Production Industry. Dublin: Coopers and Lybrand. Crofts, Stephen (2006). Reconceptualising national cinema/s. In: Theorising National Cinema (ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen), 44–58. London: BFI. Cronin, Mike (2003). Projecting the nation through sport and culture: Ireland, Aonach Tailteann and the Irish Free State. Journal of Contemporary History 38 (3): 395–411. Department of Finance (2014). Economic Impact of the Foreign‐Owned Sector in Ireland. Dublin: Department of Finance. Department of Industry and Commerce (1942). Report of the Inter‐Departmental Committee on the Film Industry. Dublin: National Archive of Ireland. Film Industry Committee (1967). Report of the Film Industry Committee. Dublin: Government Publications. Film Makers Ireland (1992). The Independent Television Production Sector Report. Dublin: FMI. Flynn, Roddy (2005). A semi‐state in all but name? Sean Lemass’s film policy. In: The Lemass Era (ed. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy), 166–190. Dublin: UCD Press. Flynn, Roddy (2007a). About Adam and Paul: film policy in Ireland since 1993. In: Mapping Irish Media (ed. John Horgan, Barbara O’Connor and Helena Sheehan), 63–78. Dublin: UCD Press. Flynn, Roddy (2007b). Raiders of the lost archive: the report of the inter‐departmental committee on the film industry 1942. Irish Communications Review 10: 30–40. Flynn, Roddy (2009). Talking a little treason: the Irish State and The Quiet Man. In: The Quiet Man and Beyond (ed. Sean Crosson and Rod Stoneman), 159–177. Dublin: The Liffey Press.



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Flynn, Roddy and O’Connell, Diog (2010). John Huston and an Irish film industry. In: John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director (ed. Tony Tracy and Roddy Flynn), 185–198. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Flynn, Roddy and Tracy, Tony (2016). Quantifying national cinema: an analysis of productions funded by the Irish Film Board/ Bord Scannán na hÉireann 1993–2013. Film Studies 14 (1): 32–53. IBEC Audiovisual Federation (1995–2012). Economic Impact of Film Production in Ireland Reports. Dublin: IBEC. Keatinge, Patrick (1973). The Formulation of Irish Foreign Policy. Dublin: IPA. McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI. McLoone, Martin (2006). An Irish national cinema. In: Theorising National Cinema (ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen), 88–99. London: BFI. McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. London: Ark. Miller, Toby, Govil, Nitin, McMurria, John, and Maxwell, Richard (2001). Global Hollywood. London: BFI. Monahan, Barry (2009). Ireland’s Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Pilkington, Lionel (2001). Theatre and State in 20th Century Ireland. London: Routledge. Pine, Richard (2002). 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio. Dublin: Four Courts. PriceWaterhouseCoopers. (2003). Review of Section  481 of the Taxes Consolidation Act. Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism/Irish Film Board. Rockett, Kevin (2004). Irish Film Censorship. Dublin: Four Courts. Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke, and Hill, John (1988). Cinema and Ireland. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Sheehy, Ted (2003). 30 Years On: The Arts Council and the Filmmaker. Dublin: Irish Film Institute. Special Working Group on the Film Production Industry (1993). Report of the Special Working Group on the Film Production Industry. Dublin: Government Publications.

18

British Cinema and Television David Rolinson

Introduction British television has had a major impact on British cinema, but the nature and value of their relationship have been fiercely debated. Understanding the financial, industrial, and aesthetic convergence between cinema and television still requires the analysis of ‘the consequences [of television finance] for the types of films made’, the survival of ‘distinct film and television aesthetics’, and ‘the possibilities of cultural address’ outlined by John Hill and Martin McLoone (1996, pp. 2–6), even though convergence has increased and diversified in the 20 years since their study. These issues are productively revealed when, as Andrews (2014, p. 22) observes, convergence is ‘met with powerful discursive and presentational acts of divergence’. Therefore, in order to discuss the relationship between cinema and t­elevision, and the tensions raised by it, this chapter will focus on examples of ­convergence and divergence. Each section begins with a landmark moment of convergence: the television premiere of Walter (1982) as the first Film on Four on the opening night of Channel 4, and the multi‐platform release of the Film 4.0 production A Field in England (2013). According to Justin Smith and Paul McDonald (2014, p. 414), ‘the intervention of television has transformed British film culture’ in terms of production, delivery and ‘the “hidden” practices of production investment and talent development’, and its contribution is even more central today because of ‘digital developments in the wider media ecology’. Each section explores the contested nature of convergence, focusing on debates about, or acts of, divergence that ­negotiate the idea that film and television have their own specific qualities. To explore these tensions arising from

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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convergence, the two sections explore ways in which texts have been described as, respectively, either not cinema or not television.

Not Cinema? The start of Channel 4 in 1982 marked ‘a new phase of interdependency’ between film and television, a coming‐together that was both economic and cultural (Caughie 1996, p. 218). British television would now invest in films for theatrical release in a more structured relationship that, according to the Policy Studies Institute in 1990, ‘prevented the wholesale collapse of the British film production industry’ (cited in Hill 1996a, p. 154). Cinema therefore gained but so did television, achieving cultural prestige consistent with discourses of public service broadcasting plus high ratings for some subsequent broadcasts and a profile in the international market on which it would depend as its own economic organisation changed (Caughie 1996, p. 218; Hill 1996a, p. 154). Before becoming Chief Executive of Channel 4, Jeremy Isaacs (1989, p. 25) outlined his plan to ‘to make, or help make, films of feature length for television here, for the cinema abroad’ as part of the channel’s remit to ‘encourage innovation’, ‘make programmes of special appeal to particular audiences’, and represent the ‘widest possible range of opinion’. This pitch was understandably attractive, following debates on the future of British cinema that aspired to television’s cultural functions as much as its greater financial security. However, there were tensions in these aims, which were made explicit in critical responses to the Film on Four productions that grew from them, starting as early as the broadcast of Walter on Channel 4’s opening night, 2 November 1982. My analysis of Walter here builds upon the emphasis in recent studies (in particular Andrews 2014) on schedules, continuity, and promotional paratexts in Channel 4 and the Film4 digital channel’s broadcast policies, branding, and critical discourses. The promotion and reception of Walter took place in a more overtly – yet contested –  televisual space, but they demonstrated a preoccupation with boundaries that would feature strongly in responses to Film on Four. Why does it matter that, as John Caughie (2000, pp. 182–183) observed, boundaries became less distinct ‘between cinema and television’ and ‘between a dramatic film and a filmed drama’? Concerns with boundaries informed scepticism about television’s place in cinema but also neglected and threatened distinctive cultures of film production within television, as we shall see. Walter (Figure 18.1) was previewed disapprovingly by the Daily Mail: The main attraction on Channel Four’s opening night … is a full‐length peak‐hour play about a mental defective who watches his mother’s decaying body being fouled with pigeon droppings; who is sexually molested by a paraplegic dwarf; and who is made to clean the excrement from his fellow patients in a lunatic asylum.

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Figure 18.1  The opening night of Channel 4: Walter (1982).

It may be a powerful drama; but can anybody really believe that this is what a significant proportion of viewers are panting to see? (Anonymous 1982a, p. 6)

Walter therefore appeared in the context of a television schedule and a media ecology based on a four‐channel offer to potentially large audiences. The words ‘play’ and ‘drama’ put Walter in a tradition of strands such as The Wednesday Play irrespective of their mixed methods – some productions were made entirely on film, some in the multi‐camera video studio, some both – or the preferences of their contributors, as embodied in the opening titles of Licking Hitler (1978): a Play for Today with the credit ‘a film by David Hare’. Therefore, there were precedents for the typological confusion in the discourse surrounding Walter and Channel 4’s relationship with cinema. Such tensions were evident in Walter’s presentation in the TV Times listings for ITV and Channel 4 on 2 November 1982 (Anonymous 1982b): 9.0 Film on Four IAN McKELLEN



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WALTER BY DAVID COOK FILM

The TV Times listing presented Film on Four in bold as a header, the same presentation given to drama series, which made Film on Four resemble strand titles like Play for Today. However, the listing also used its standard practice for presenting cinema films – a film cell illustration with ‘FILM’ at its centre – in a way that was consistent with Film on Four’s brand identity. Listing Ian McKellen on the next line further ­differentiated it from drama listings, which positioned writers in that space, but the credit ‘by David Cook’ was consistent with television’s discursive practices regarding authorship, prioritising the writer over director Stephen Frears, who was credited with other crew after the preview text. The final line, ‘Central Production’, differentiated Walter from cinema listings practice and underlined Channel 4’s role as a ­publisher (of material from that ITV company) rather than as a producer of content. However, in the branded Channel 4 boxout headed ‘Starting tonight’, Walter was billed as ‘The opening night film’. Isaacs (1989, p. 51) later explained that he ‘front‐ loaded the first ten evenings with good movies’ for impact, including ‘some of our own making’ such as Walter and P’Tang Yang Kipperbang. Terms were slippery on Channel 4 itself – its Preview programme earlier on 2 November described Film on Four as ‘a title covering a series of dramas specially commissioned for Channel 4’ and Walter as ‘a film that is disturbing and controversial to say the least’ – and in press coverage: when the Standard wondered why the channel chose ‘one of the most shocking films about mental handicap ever shown on British TV’, Isaacs celebrated ‘one of the most powerful and moving performances I’ve ever seen in television drama’. Julian Barnes’s comment that Walter ‘almost required physical courage to watch’ (Barnes 1982, p. 36) tallied with Isaacs’ view that Channel 4’s public‐service remit and identity were served by such a difficult piece. Therefore, Isaacs (1989, p. 56) chose Walter ahead of ‘easier on the eye’ pieces in order to ‘start as we mean to go on’: contrary to network conventions, Isaacs felt that Channel 4’s diversity meant that nobody would watch it continuously. Isaacs’ assistant John Ranelagh ‘thought it was sending out the wrong message, yet it turned out to be the right one’, and Walter earned Channel 4 its highest rating on launch day (Brown 2007, pp. 57, 61). Its scheduling made it a television event and marked Film on Four’s centrality to Channel 4’s identity. The reception of Walter established aesthetic and cultural tensions that would later appear in film critics’ disparagement of television’s relationship with cinema. Barnes (1982, p. 36), who approached Channel 4’s opening night doubting its radicalism because it’s ‘still only television’, found Walter problematic because the original n ­ ovel’s imagery became too overtly symbolic. For Barnes, this ‘wasn’t just a change of emphasis in the script; it was a difference of medium. The gravitational pull of television is naturally towards documentary’ and so the book’s ‘careful, fond elaboration of character into a shaped fiction’ gave way to the drama’s movement ‘towards social

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anger at the harshness of supposedly caring institutions’ which Barnes saw as a ­televisual approach: ‘Cathy Come Home land’. Meanwhile, Russell Davies (1982, p. 39) welcomed Film on Four for being ‘not conscious of itself as “A Television Programme”’, and enjoyed its ‘Opening series credits, displaying tools of film‐making’. Davies’s ­concern with imagery almost reversed Barnes’s: unhappy about the ‘Guignol effect’ of the pigeons flocking into Walter’s dead mother’s bedroom and a ‘bedlamite ­waking‐up sequence in [an] asylum’, Davies thought they were ‘made with more of an eye for what constitutes a vivid film scene than for telling truths about Walter’. Chris Menges’ cinematography included a devastating long Steadicam take walking with Walter as he entered an institution: Frears later referred to this as ‘breaking down traditional television story‐telling devices’, an example of his shooting television pieces ‘in a style that was in fact regarded as primarily cinematic. It was very ambitious for television’ (in Hacker and Price 1991, p. 169). This comment resembled a hierarchical value judgement – ambitious for television – but problematised that hierarchy by valuably reminding film critics not to neglect his (and, arguably, all) work made for television. Critics and practitioners largely saw television as a ‘writer’s medium’ in which a director was a metteur‐en‐scène because of stage‐set production practices and theatrical backgrounds which fermented beliefs in ‘serving’ the written text. When Sight and Sound profiled Frears, it was within the collaborative frame of ‘Frears and Company’, alongside writer Alan Bennett and directors of photography Chris Menges and Brian Tufano, ‘a group of film‐makers who had met under the massive umbrella of the television companies and afterwards sought to retain their individual voices through each other’s creative abilities’ (Badder 1978, p. 70). Frears was ‘sceptical of any fundamental difference between making films for television and making them for the cinema’ and placed the cinema success of My Beautiful Laundrette within the ‘British television tradition’ that film critics seemed to miss (Hill 1996b, pp. 226, 228). I will return to this television tradition, but its aesthetic implications exacerbated the belief within the film industry that, as Christine Geraghty (2005, pp. 6–7) reported, ‘the films made for Film on Four (and the BBC) represented a threat to the essence of cinema’, given a belief that television was primarily a verbal medium which could not inscribe meaning in visual complexity. In Sight and Sound’s debate, ‘British Cinema: Life before Death on Television’, Penelope Houston (1984, p. 115) welcomed Film on Four but argued that ‘the movie movie, as opposed to the TV movie, enjoys not only a wider vitality, but the power to probe more deeply’: there were ‘crucial aesthetic differences’ but also ‘differences in the quality of the experience’. Film director Alan Parker connected aesthetics and the viewing experience in his 1986 documentary A Turnip‐head’s Guide to the British Cinema, describing cinema as a ‘magical place’ where screen size and sound were overwhelming, as opposed to television, which ‘reduced’ life ‘to the size of a box in the living room’; Martin McLoone (1996, p. 103) effectively unpicked Parker’s claims that television was lost on cinema screens and that its directors, ‘brought up on the notion of film but not movies’, could not ‘escape the confines of this box – of this cell’. Smith and McDonald (2014, pp. 413–414) noted that such criticisms were answered by the Cannes Film Festival’s special award to Channel 4 in



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1987 and the commercial and critical success of such films as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), The Crying Game (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1993), Trainspotting (1996), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), and 12 Years a Slave (2013) which made Film on Four (later Film4) ‘­synonymous with a rejuvenated national cinema’ and made television ‘a vital cornerstone of government film policy’. However, the underlying assumptions of these criticisms continue to inform methodological concerns, as we shall see. These assumptions underscored responses to several of Frears’ pieces that moved between television and cinema. When Bloody Kids (1980), directed by Frears from a Stephen Poliakoff script, gained a cinema release after its ITV broadcast, reviewer Tim Pulleine (1983, p. 38) stressed that, although it was made for ­television, it ‘­certainly has the visual momentum to hold its own on the big screen’. This rhetorical divergence even at the point of convergence, and ­essentialism even in praise (cinema as a medium of momentum and size that television, a visitor, is assumed to lack or not understand), were characteristic of debates that followed. My Beautiful Laundrette was successful in cinemas but, as its writer Hanif Kureishi recalled, it ‘was shot in 16 mm as a TV film’: the logic of blowing it up to 35 mm and transferring it was that, although more people would see it on television, ‘it would receive wider critical coverage’ in cinema (Geraghty 2005, p. 11). Frears has argued against theatrical releases for some of his work: admiring Jimmy McGovern’s script for Liam, Frears ‘had it written in my contract that it could be shown only on television’, where ‘it was very, very successful’, but ‘almost against my will, it became a part of the commercial cinema where it has no place at all’ (in Lucia 2003, p. 10). The judgement here positions television not only as a platform that serves strong writing but also as a mode of cultural address and a public service. Frears similarly resisted a cinema release for The Deal – feeling that it ‘would have cost more money and put more pressure on it’  –  but aimed its semi‐sequel The Queen for the cinema. The Queen playfully engages with form as status: at the start, when the Queen watches Prime Minister Tony Blair on television, he is confined in 4 : 3, on video, incorporated into the widescreen film. The production company credit  –  ‘A Granada Production’  –  is superimposed below the set on which Blair appears, reminding us of another television company’s involvement with cinema, while reminding us of Granada’s previous collaboration with this team on The Deal, which interrogated Blair’s rise as a television politician. In The Queen, Blair is shot on Super 16 mm film while the Queen is shot on 35 mm, and this different aesthetic reflects their respective statuses while playing with a distinction that had been central to earlier responses to convergence. The rise of 16 mm in 1960s television facilitated a culture of filmmaking but the BBC initially resisted it because ‘16 mm was for news, current affairs and documentaries, while 35 mm was for drama’ and they wanted ‘A‐list drama, not B‐movies’ (cited in Hayward 2004, pp. 58–60). So 16 mm won and many ambitious television films were made with it, but 16 mm restricted distribution without the cost of transferring to the standard cinematic gauge of 35 mm. Blair, on 16 mm, is doubly a second‐class citizen.

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However, strategies of divergence were suspiciously close to disavowal. A  vibrant national cinema could benefit from convergence in terms of cultural address, by drawing ‘sustenance from television’s public service tradition’ in order to ‘speak to their own cultures’; Film on Four productions were more varied than feared, with ‘no shared television influence or “TV aesthetic”’, and the criticisms made against television films for their ‘literariness and lack of visual intelligence’ or ‘subordination to a realist aesthetic’ had also been made against British cinema (Hill 1996a, p. 166). As BBC Plays became BBC Films, as BBC drama strands became Screen One and Screen Two, as Channel 4 branded its season of BBC Play for Today repeats as Film4Today (Andrews 2014, pp. 60–67), convergence impacted on television as much as cinema. In this section, we have seen how, as John Caughie (2007, p. 24) put it, ‘culturally, Channel 4 began a new alignment between cinema and television’; in the next section we move up to date to consider the implications of the fact that ‘Aesthetically, television drama increasingly aspired to look like ­cinematic film’.

Not Television? This section begins with two recent multi‐platform releases directed by Ben Wheatley, to illustrate current modes of convergence and, in their discursive handling, to open up wider aesthetic and cultural implications. Despite gaining from cultures of television filmmaking, cinema has differentiated itself from television in terms of certain key characteristics, but that differentiation has involved hierarchical judgements that television itself now reinforces with its own discursive and presentational acts of divergence. A Field in England illustrates the continuing benefits for cinema of the logic of convergence (Caughie 1996, 2000), as television provides ‘not only the most ­economically prudent form of cinema for European countries but also the one most likely to offer a culturally distinctive alternative to Hollywood’s “global” norm’ (Hill and McLoone 1996, p. 6). On 5 July 2013, A Field in England received a simultaneous multi‐platform release in cinemas (17 screens in the Picturehouse chain), on free‐to‐air television (Film4), on sell‐through physical formats (DVD and Blu‐ray) and on video‐on‐demand [VoD] (iTunes and Film4OD). As Andrews (2014, p. 191) observed, some micro‐budget films had already been released across pay‐television, VoD and DVD because this ‘blanket release’ strategy to ‘rationalise spending on marketing’ was ‘a new reality for the low‐budget film sector’; h ­ owever, it was the use of free‐to‐air television that made A Field in England ‘revolutionary’ (Figure 18.2). The existence of the Film4 channel was itself a marker of convergence and the  role that film had played in Channel 4’s evolution as a digital broadcaster. Launched in November 1998 as premium subscription channel FilmFour,



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Figure 18.2  Multi‐platform release: A Field in England (2013).

with discourses of ‘quality’ and modes of address targeted at the ‘discriminating audience’ associated with ‘arthouse’ modes that synthesised with Channel 4 brand values, the channel subsequently gained and lost sister channels Extreme and World during unsuccessful commercial expansions under umbrella company 4Ventures, and was rebranded as free‐to‐air Film4 in 2006 after rejoining Channel 4’s corporate management (Andrews 2014, pp. 136, 142). Channel 4’s remit ‘to nurture new talent’ and ‘encourage experimentation and innovation’ found a further integrated outlet in the creation in 2011 of Film 4.0, a digital initiative which combined ‘web‐based marketing, distribution and interactive tools’ (Andrews 2014, pp. 189–190) and received funding from the BFI’s New Models Distribution Fund  –  which aimed to ‘support experimental and ambitious release models’ (Film4.com) – for its first feature‐length piece, A Field in England. The film was signposted as something new in the continuity announcement that preceded its first Film4 broadcast: Time to take a trip into the past, while experiencing something brand‐new. Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England is next here on Film4 at the same time that it’s in cinemas, on video‐on‐demand and DVD. An imaginative tale of Civil War deserters coming into contact with the dark arts, A Field in England will play with no breaks and features nudity, very strong language, violence and flashing images. And don’t miss Ben Wheatley talking about the film straight after the end credits.

The release strategy is signposted as being at least as new as the content. The announcement locates it within television practices: its place in the night’s schedule, the clumsy incorporation of required warnings into a sentence offering teasers regarding narrative content, and the chance to hear from the director. This last element continues the curatorial function that Andrews (2014, p. 152) observed in the promotional discourses of Film4’s free‐to‐air debut that

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maintained ‘its image as a source of knowledge about movies’ in line with its ­perceptions of audience profile. Post‐broadcast discussions have a long history in British television, but Film4.com placed post‐film content in different experiential contexts: the multi‐platform release presented audiences with ‘the choice of how and where to experience’ the film, either ‘amidst an audience in a cinema, followed by a satellite Q&A with Ben and the cast’ or at home with DVD or Film4 extras, the ‘freedom’ of watching when convenient on VoD or the immersiveness of planned future screenings in fields in England. The hub function of Film 4.0 shows television’s continuing value to cinema in terms of talent development and, as Sue Bruce‐Smith (Film4’s head of commercial and branding strategy) noted, getting ‘as large an audience as possible’ for independent film through attempting to ‘challenge traditional release patterns’. For Wheatley, making the film available more widely than its cinema release and more quickly than conventional sell‐through release strategies prevented its ‘­message’ from being ‘diluted’ (Sweeney 2013). The distribution strategy itself generated publicity  –  these quotations come from news coverage of the release  –  above the usual level for low‐budget experimental films. Wheatley stressed that ‘you need to be financed by a channel’ for this strategy to work (in Sweeney 2013), but if cinema gained from convergence, then so did television, which got an hour and a half of material for £300 000, less than half the typical cost of an hour of television drama (Andrews 2014, p. 190). However, while acknowledging the benefits of economic convergence, discourse surrounding the film built on questions of the specificity of experience in order to perform the divergent function of questioning television’s suitability as a platform. For Wheatley, the fact that 5 of the 17 screenings sold out, despite Film4 showing the film for free at the same time, proved that cinema offered ‘a different experience’, because the ‘images are designed to be seen on a big screen’: seeing ‘something where you’ve got something at the periphery of your vision’ differs from ‘seeing an image that has got your front room around most of the edge of it’ (Sweeney 2013). This resembles Parker’s logic: a small screen in a domestic space being seen as inherently inferior to large screens and the inarticulable (note Wheatley’s repetition of ‘something’) qualities of scale. Similarly, the announcer’s introduction stressed the broadcast’s difference (no breaks) just as the interstitial advertisements for the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral had shown that television can package films ‘to stand out from the usual flow of television’ and thereby ‘enact rhetorical divergence between the “film” broadcast and the “rest” of television’ as if the film is ‘culturally more valid and valuable’ (Andrews 2014, p. 82). In the discourses surrounding the multi‐ platform release of A Field in England, the rhetoric of choice in convergence resolves itself into hierarchies of value through divergence: the television broadcast as an economically useful but aesthetically lesser platform for something happening elsewhere. To an extent this marks a return to earlier British television’s relay function (broadcasting events such as sections of theatre plays) and privileging of



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liveness as distinctive, specifically televisual qualities. These features were criticised at the start of British television in 1936: as Charles Barr (1996, 54–55) noted, for filmmakers and critics such as Alberto Cavalcanti, John Grierson, and Graham Greene, television could only be an art medium if it relied on film rather than emphasising its difference from cinema. And yet, contemporary cinema too serves a relay function. Live cinema ­broadcasts of theatre events, such as National Theatre plays, have been labelled ‘simultaneous broadcasts’, though Janice Wardle (2014, p. 134) has proposed that we call them ‘outside broadcasts’ in the same language as earlier television, because they ‘seem to hark back to an earlier age of broadcasting’ in their technological, cultural, ideological, and nostalgic undercurrents. Also, cinema serves to simulcast television. Indeed, a year after A Field in England, Ben Wheatley had another production straddling television and cinema, when the Doctor Who episode ‘Deep Breath’ (BBC 1, 23 August 2014) received a limited (though less so than A Field in England) theatrical release in addition to its regular worldwide television ­broadcasts. Its US release, handled by BBC America and Fathom Events, was number 1 at the box office for 25 August and the top ‘alternative content’ event of the year (bbc.co.uk). This built upon Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary 3D special ‘The Day of the Doctor’ (BBC 1, 23 November 2013). Directed by Nick Hurran – though, as with ‘Deep Breath’, writer Steven Moffat was privileged in promotional discourses – it was simulcast in 94 countries and six continents (a Guinness World Record) with a limited global cinema release that included taking £1.7 million (third in the box office) in the UK despite airing for free, to a large audience, on BBC 1. Where experiential specificity featured in paratexts, it was connected with fan engagement and the sense of being part of a communal event: as Matt Hills (2014, p. 168) observed, the BBC, in receipt of the licence fee, could not position the episode as a ‘money‐ spinner’ but instead celebrated the reach of the simulcast in a narrative of ‘social glue’, integrative rituals which affirmed the continued relevance of the BBC and public‐service discourses. This form of rhetorical divergence stressed television’s modes of cultural address but also affirmed hierarchies of value: the BBC’s report on ‘Deep Breath’ stated that the Doctor had ‘proven himself ’ on the ‘big screen’. It is possible to contest claims that television is insufficiently cinematic – Vincent Canby (1988) welcomed the Dennis Potter‐scripted BBC serial The Singing Detective (1986) to American cinemas as ‘more of a movie than anything one is likely to see in most theatres these days’ – but what is at stake when television, and scholars of television, make such claims? According to Deborah Jaramillo (2013, p. 67), ‘“cinematic” should be a contentious word’ in Television Studies but is instead used widely, not merely to describe ‘the complex visual and aural style of scripted series like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad’ but as ‘an inherently positive, even boastful word’ that perpetuates an ‘antiquated … hierarchy’. For Robin Nelson (2007, p. 11), the use of the word ‘cinematic’ just meant ‘an enhanced visual style’ and ‘narrative form’ but its employment showed an industry‐led ‘impetus to

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reconceive TV’ in which notions of ‘quality’ in American television facilitated the targeting of a demographic on a subscription model, hence the disavowal: ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO.’ So pervasive is broadsheet misuse of ‘cinematic’ that even a programme‐maker, eulogising British television drama, argues that the likes of Peaky Blinders and Top of the Lake ‘wouldn’t be out of place in cinema’, which ­television is ‘now able to rival’ (Savage 2014). Nearly two decades after ‘Life Before Death on Television’, Sight and Sound ran a ‘Television Special’ which argued that ‘Television is better than the movies now’ (Miller 2013, p. 20). Notwithstanding the ahistoricism of current writing about television that makes the word ‘now’ at least as problematic as ‘cinematic’, the seeming hierarchical reversal is undercut by the convergent and divergent front cover headline ‘The hidden gems of the small screen: when film directors make TV’. If television is only of interest when directors who have already attained film critics’ cultural validation move into it, and if their work will be ‘hidden’ (that is to say, shown on television while television has the audacity to be television around it), there are clear implications for the possibility of televisual specificity in terms of cultural address and aesthetics. Twenty years ago, Charles Barr expressed ‘regret’ at ‘the tendency of “quality” drama to align itself so insistently with cinema, and the readiness of commentators to see this one‐way movement as unproblematically progressive’. If drama made on film was ‘deficient’, it was because it lacked the strengths not only of ‘good cinema’ but also of ‘good ­television’ (Barr 1996, pp. 69–70). This applies to cultural address, as John Caughie (2000, p. 183) has observed: Film on Four ‘came to mean quality and, increasingly, an art cinema which was almost incidentally shown on television’, with a consequence that he observed in the shift between two Ken Loach productions: Cathy Come Home, which ‘circulated as a national event and functioned as documentary evidence within the political sphere’, and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), which ‘circulates within an aesthetic and a cultural sphere which is given prestige (and economic viability) by international critics’ awards’. Therefore, for Caughie, ‘the gain of a British art cinema may be at the expense of something quite valuable and immediate in a national television system’ (Caughie 2000, p. 198). The word ‘cinematic’ also ‘muddles a serious discussion of television aesthetics’ by placing texts and style outwith the medium ( Jaramillo 2013, p. 67) and neglecting forms such as video studio plays whose own experiments and innovations are in danger of being regarded as ‘simply a stage, through which television had, inevitably to pass before arriving at its true destiny (film)’ (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 38). The television ‘gems’ that have been ‘hidden’ include an entire television culture of indigenous filmmaking. Television’s financial and cultural confidence resulted in hundreds of slots for dramas which employed diverse styles and genres to reflect diverse and often marginalised aspects of British experience. Elsewhere, I have argued for the importance of television films to our understanding of 1970s British cinema (Rolinson 2010); as Mike Leigh argued, ‘the British film industry was alive and well and hiding out in television’ (Movshovitz 2000, p. 49), even if he was



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f­rustrated that his work was not widely seen beyond British television screenings. I have also studied the work of the major television director Alan Clarke (Rolinson 2005). Both pieces challenge the essentialist neglect of television direction and chart the reasons, and possible solutions, for that neglect in Film Studies, Television Studies, and popular discourse. One of the ways in which the relationship between British cinema and television has been usefully explored is through the contribution of David Rose, whose roles include Head of BBC English Regions Drama and Channel 4’s first Commissioning Editor for Fiction (see Rolinson 2005, 2007, 2010; Cooke 2012; Mayne 2012; Andrews 2014). In a relatively autonomous position at BBC Pebble Mill, Rose had national slots for dramas depicting different aspects of life in the regions, a specificity of cultural address that resulted in varied thematic and stylistic approaches which ranged from the social realism with which such drama is often reductively associated to such mythic fantasy pieces as Red Shift (1978) and Penda’s Fen (1974). Rose described his move to Channel 4 as ‘a smooth transition’ because he was doing ‘pretty well exactly what I was doing in Pebble Mill’: for example, Michael Radford’s Another Time, Another Place (1983) ‘did what we were trying to do in Birmingham’ in its artistic response to a community (in Mayne 2012, pp. 45, 48). The issue is not merely that Rose found a similar institutional position  –  as Mayne (2012, pp. 45–46) summarises, maintaining a degree of autonomy, being shielded from commercial considerations by Channel 4’s public service remit and financial settlement  –  but that British cinema gained from its television inheritance. This inheritance was both cultural – 21 of the 66 Film on Four pieces transmitted between 1982 and 1987 were set in either Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or the English regions – and aesthetic, since Film on Four was ‘the natural outcome of the single play, many of which [Rose] believed could equally have been released as films’. The fact that most previous films for television were not released in cinemas motivated film critics’ neglect of them but using distribution platforms as culturally hierarchised markers of divergence was, and remains, problematic. Penda’s Fen was not a ‘film’ because it was not originated for the cinema, but it has ­subsequently received a number of acclaimed screenings (Sandhu 2014). Cultural judgements remain: critics were no more likely to praise Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) despite it being originated for cinema. The binaries cinema/not cinema and television/not television are troubled by multi‐platform releases such as A Field in England and phenomenological concerns with audience experience. Similar challenges are posed in scholarship on transmediality, paratextuality, and brand management: Matt Hills (2015, p. 103) observes that the simulcast of ‘The Day of the Doctor’ and associated events formed a ‘zone of liveness’ (via Crisell 2012, p. 45) which problematised ‘legitimating discourses’ in that television gained from ‘(3D) cinematization’ while cinema gained from ‘(the time‐bound, collective/ co‐present viewing of ) televisionization’. Film and television viewers alike access content on a variety of platforms and devices other than cinema or television screens, those modes of reception which were essentialised as examples of medium

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specificity either in terms of cinema’s immersive scale and television’s domestic reception context. Therefore, the rhetoric of convergence has shifted, but the ­rhetoric of divergence – while problematised – remains. The history of screen aesthetics across cinema, television, internet, and other forms (see Creeber 2013) is more nuanced than the policing of boundaries ­between cinema and television allows. Furthermore, that act of divergence serves not only to neglect television’s distinctive contribution to British cinema but to muddle understanding of British cinema itself. The misuse of the term ‘cinematic’ has implications for cinema, effacing its ‘wide array of visual styles, conventions, genres and aesthetics’ (Mills 2013, p. 60) and reflecting not an ‘essential’ difference between cinema and television but a prioritisation of large‐scale ‘event’ filmmaking that neglects British  –  indeed, much non‐Hollywood  –  cinema (Hill 1999, p. 64). Television’s relationship with cinema, and the value of that relationship, will continue to be contested, but rather than rendering television as ‘other’ we may find in that process of contestation and its terms of engagement (such as convergence and divergence) ways in which to productively explore British cinema’s modes of address, aesthetic range and specific qualities.

References Andrews, Hannah (2014). Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergence Since 1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Anonymous (1982a). ‘Unhappy start’. Daily Mail (30 October), p. 6. Anonymous (1982b). ‘ITV and Channel 4 listings for 2 November’. TV Times (30 October–5 November), pp. 60–61. Badder, David (1978). Frears and company: conversations with Stephen Frears, Alan Bennett, Brian Tufano, Chris Menges. Sight and Sound 47 (2): 70–75. Barnes, John. (1982). ‘First thoughts on Four’. The Observer (7 November), p. 36. Barr, Charles (1996). “They think it’s all over”: the dramatic legacy of live television. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 47–75. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton Press. BBC Media Centre. (2014). ‘The new era of Doctor Who conquered cinemas August 25 with Doctor Who: Deep Breath Special Screening Event’. Available at: www.bbc.co. uk/mediacentre/worldwide/2014/bbc‐america‐doctor‐who‐deep‐breath (accessed 13 October 2014). Bignell, Jonathan, Lacey, Stephen, and Macmurraugh‐Kavanagh, Madeleine (eds.) (2000). British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brown, Maggie (2007). A Licence to be Different: The Story of Channel 4. London: British Film Institute. Canby, Vincent (1988). ‘Is the year’s best film on TV?’. New York Times (10 July). Caughie, John (1996). The logic of convergence. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 215–223. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton Press.



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Caughie, John (2000). Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caughie, John (2007). Edge of Darkness. London: British Film Institute. Cooke, Lez (2012). A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama 1956–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Creeber, Glen (2013). Small Screen Aesthetics: From TV to the Internet. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute. Crisell, Andrew (2012). Liveness and Recording in the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, Russell (1982). ‘Channel 4: a sight for sore eyes’. Sunday Times (7 November), p. 39. Geraghty, Christine (2005). My Beautiful Laundrette. London: I.B. Tauris. Hacker, Jonathan and Price, David (1991). Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hayward, Anthony (2004). Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films. London: Bloomsbury. Hill, John (1996a). British television and film: the making of a relationship. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 151–176. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton Press. Hill, John (1996b). ‘Enmeshed in British society but with a yen for American movies’: film, television and Stephen Frears. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 224–231. Luton: John Libbey/ University of Luton Press. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, John and McLoone, Martin (1996). Introduction. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 1–16. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton Press. Hills, Matt (2014). The tear of the Doctor: celebrating the 50th, regenerating public value? Science Fiction Film and Television 72: 159–178. Hills, Matthew (2015). Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event  –  Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Houston, Penelope (1984). Introduction to British cinema: life before death on television. Sight and Sound 53 (2): 115–116. Film4.com. (2013). ‘A Field in England’. Available at: http://www.film4.com/reviews/ 2013/a‐field‐in‐england (accessed 13 October 2014). Isaacs, Jeremy (1989). Storm Over 4: A Personal Account. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Jaramillo, Deborah (2013). Rescuing television from the “cinematic”: the perils of dismissing television style. In: Television Aesthetics and Style (ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock), 67–75. London: Routledge. Lucia, Cynthia (2003). The complexities of cultural change: an interview with Stephen Frears. Cineaste Fall: 8–15. Mayne, Laura (2012). “Creative commissioning”: examining the regional aesthetic in the work of Channel 4’s first commissioning editor for fiction, David Rose. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (1): 40–57. McLoone, Martin (1996). Boxed in? The aesthetics of film and television. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 76–106. Luton: John Libbey/University of Luton Press. Miller, Henry K. (2013). Home cinema. Sight and Sound 23 (9): 20–22.

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Mills, Brett (2013). What does it mean to call television “cinematic”? In: Television Aesthetics and Style (ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock), 57–66. London: Routledge. Movshovitz, Howie (ed.) (2000). Mike Leigh Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Nelson, Robin (2007). State of Play: Contemporary ‘High‐end’ TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pulleine, Tim (1983). Bloody Kids review. Films and Filming, October, p. 38. Rolinson, David (2005). Alan Clarke. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rolinson, David (2007). The surprise of a large town: depicting regional space in Alan Plater’s Land of Green Ginger. Journal of British Cinema and Television 4 (2): 285–306. Rolinson, David (2010). The last studio system: the case for British television films. In: Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (ed. Paul Newland), 163–176. Bristol: Intellect. Sandhu, Sukhdev (ed.) (2014). The Edge Is Where the Centre Is. London: Seen Studio. Savage, Dominic (2014). ‘British TV drama? It’s never been better’. Observer (19 October). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/tv‐and‐radio/2014/oct/19/ british‐tv‐drama‐never‐been‐better‐peaky‐blinders (accessed 19 October 2014). Smith, Justin and McDonald, Paul (2014). Introduction. Journal of British Cinema and Television 11 (4): 413–417. Sweeney, Sabrina. (2013). ‘Ben Wheatley “overwhelmed” with reaction to A Field in England’. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment‐arts‐23252045 (accessed 13 October 2013). Wardle, Janice (2014). “Outside broadcast”: looking backwards and forwards, live theatre in the cinema–NT Live and RSC Live. Adaptation 7 (2): 134–153.

Part IV

Representation and Identity

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Gender, Sexuality, and British Cinema Niall Richardson

Introduction Within film studies, the analysis of gender and sexuality has developed from two main trajectories of feminist theory: ‘images of woman’ and ‘woman as image’ (see Thornham 1999, p. 2). The ‘images of woman’ approach, stemming from scholarship in the mass communication model, analysed (stereo)types of f­ emininity represented on the screen and considered how these images may be read as a cultural barometer of the gender politics of the period (Haskell 1974; Mellen 1974; Rosen 1975). By contrast, the ‘woman as image’ method of analysis considered how femininity was mediated on the screen and, building upon theoretical ­developments within art history (Berger 1972), attempted to address the dynamics of gazing upon these images of female bodies (Mulvey 1975). However, one particular criticism of feminist film scholarship was whether these critical paradigms should be applied universally – across all national cinemas and genres (Williams 1989, p. 334). Cinema is not monolithic and its narrative forms and constructions of gendered identifications are modified by issues of national identification (especially race and class) and genre. It is this question of nationality (Britishness) which this chapter will consider. What are the key ­discourses within British cinema that distinguish its representation of gender (both femininity and masculinity), its gendered address, and its representation of queerness from other mainstream narrative cinemas  –  not least Hollywood? In order to consider this, the chapter will analyse certain films which have generated a range of key debates that illuminate what has been at stake in analysing ­femininity, masculinity, and queerness in British cinema. The argument will not claim that this

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small selection of films emblematises cultural trends but rather that they have inspired many of the key discussions in this area.

Not Such Feminine Brief Encounters?: From ‘Superior Woman’ to Postfeminist ‘Lady Power’ The history of British cinema has been distinguished by, on the one hand, ­representations of femininity which can be identified as pro‐feminist but also by films which have been distinguished by their extreme sexism, if not even unashamed misogyny. For example, British cinema has been praised for giving greater space for the female friendship film than could be found in Hollywood (Bell 2010a, p. 99) and British melodramas have also been celebrated for giving ‘priority’ to ‘female desire’ (Harper 2000, p. 60). Yet, on the other hand, British cinema has also been noted for representations such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) which, although having been reclaimed (notably by male critics) as a meta‐critical examination of cinematic spectatorship, is still, as Sue Harper argues, a ‘loathsome film’ which ‘colludes with, and celebrates, men’s physical power over women’ (2000, p. 107). In a similar vein, British cinema’s tradition of low‐brow comedy  –  exemplified by the Carry On ­tradition – may be read through a lens of camp and the carnivalesque but these films are still a celebration of end‐of‐the‐pier misogyny in which the cruellest ­stereotypes are those based on women’s bodies and femininity (Gray 1998). Unsurprisingly, a considerable amount of feminist film criticism of British cinema has been driven by the ‘images of woman’ approach. Yet, in contrast to the analyses of Hollywood representations of femininity, British feminist criticism has been interested in how mediations of women have not only emblematised the gender politics of the period but, on occasions, have represented a sense of national identification. Antonia Lant’s survey of British wartime filmmaking (2014), for example, argued that many British wartime films represented the unglamorous female star not only as a rejection of Hollywood iconography but as a symbol of patriotic, national identity. By contrast, the glamorous and seductive spectacle was coded as unpatriotic extravagance or even as something suspicious which ­suggested collusion with the enemy. In other words, the anxieties about British national identification have often been gendered within British cinema (see also Gledhill and Swanson 2012) so that a particular type of middle‐class, restrained femininity has often stood in for the nation state. At the forefront of these debates has been the dynamic that exists between ­femininity and class. As Beverly Skeggs famously argued, ‘Femininity emerged as an ideal in the eighteenth century and was signified by ease, restraint, calm and luxurious decoration’ (Skeggs 1997, p. 99). The ‘respectable’ female body is ‘white, desexualised, hetero‐feminine and usually middle class’ (Skeggs 1997, p. 82). Although all Anglophone, narrative cinema will represent issues of classed



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femininity, British popular culture and cinema are distinguished by their candid and explicit address of this particular subject – often mobilising the middle‐class female body not only as a metaphor of an anti‐Hollywood aesthetic but as a symbol of British nationality. This section will examine how this particular discourse of middle‐class femininity, symbolic of the nation state, is dominant within British cinema and can be traced from the debates that have been in circulation around one of Britain’s ‘classic’ films, Brief Encounter (1945), through to contemporary discussions about postfeminist cinema and culture. Brief Encounter is remarkable in the history of Anglophone cinema in that it is not only identified as a ‘woman’s film’, demonstrating the narrative and stylistic features of the feminine melodrama, but has also been celebrated as an example of Britain’s ‘Quality’ cinema. As John Ellis (1978) argued, the 1940s British press established discourses on the idea of what constituted ‘Quality’ Cinema: the type of films which, according to the critics, should be supported by the British film industry not only for the way they adhered to principles of classical storytelling but also for how they evoked a sense of British national character. On a number of levels, it is obvious why the critics praised Brief Encounter, given that the film does adhere to the classical idea of narration, maintaining the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and plot (Dyer 1993a, p. 44), and also bears the authorial stamp of Noël Coward (Medhurst 1991). Reviewers praised Celia Johnson’s acting for its restraint and for the way in which her portrayal of Laura was ‘beautifully sincere’ (see Ellis 1978) (Figure  19.1). By contrast, the other ‘woman’s film’ released in 1945 – Gainsborough’s The Wicked Lady – was attacked by the critics. If Celia Johnson’s acting in Brief Encounter was an example of craftsmanship, then Margaret Lockwood was ‘inept to the point of exasperation’ (see Harper 1987). If Brief Encounter was ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ (quoted in Ellis 1978), then The Wicked Lady’s ‘attempt at credibility [was] atrocious’ (quoted in Harper 1987). Melanie Bell (2010b, 2011a, 2011b) has recently explored the discourses of classed femininity celebrated not only within the film texts of the period but also by film critics of this era through an analysis of the identification termed the ‘superior woman persona’ (Bell 2010b; see also Langhamer 2005, 2006). Middle‐ class femininity was (as Skeggs has argued) distinguished by its self‐restraint, ­sensibility, and, most importantly, an ironic detachment from all things emotional and excessive. Both Bell and Dyer (1993a) argue that this ‘class‐specific gender discourse’ (Dyer 1993a, p. 40) is celebrated in Brief Encounter and embodied in the heroine Laura Jesson. As Dyer argues, ‘Laura is ironic, worldly (“sensible”) and brisk’ (1993a, p. 40). She may well read romance novels but she keeps an emotional distance from their excesses and passion. The point is that Brief Encounter  –  a female‐narrated film – is not criticising feminine interests (as Dyer asserts ‘no film is more of a melodrama than Brief Encounter’ [1993a, p. 49]) but that its critique is directed at working‐class, feminine popular culture. As Dyer argues, Brief Encounter is very insistent that it not only distances its protagonist from its working‐class characters (1993a, p. 61) but that the film distinguishes itself from popular ­

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Figure 19.1  Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945).

(working‐class, feminine) culture (1993a, p. 50). One of the most self‐reflexive moments in the film is the scene where Laura and Alec watch the movie trailer for Flames of Passion – the type of excessive, vulgar film against which Brief Encounter distinguishes itself. The trailer’s ludicrousness (it suggests a nonsensical film which is a pot pourri of everything deemed ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’) is acknowledged by Laura and Alec through their ironic eye‐meets. The ridiculousness of Flames of Passion is then mocked further by its trailer being followed by an advertisement for a baby’s pram  –  the actual outcome of heterosexual flames of passion (see Dyer 1993a, pp. 49–50). In this respect, Brief Encounter may be read as emblematic of a particular discourse of ‘quality’ or ‘acceptable’ femininity that can be found throughout British cinema but, most importantly, that this femininity is symbolic of British decorum and a metaphor for ‘quality’ cinema itself. Arguably, this ‘superior woman’ discourse can be traced throughout the subsequent history of British cinema but can be seen to have reappeared in a section of contemporary ­postfeminist sensibility identified by Angela Smith (2013) as ‘Lady Power’. Postfeminism is a baggy monster and there are many debates about this identification (see Richardson 2006; Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007; Tasker and Negra 2007; Negra 2008). Contemporary postfeminism is a ‘sensibility’ (Gill 2007) rather than an organised political movement and, in many ways, is synonymous with a certain type of discourse articulated in contemporary media dramas and television



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shows. Postfeminism has been viewed as a complex backlash against second‐wave feminism (McRobbie 2007); a reclamation of feminine iconography (Moseley 2002); an ­exaltation of ‘choice’ (but often a choice that is little more than the right to consume copious amounts of luxury goods (Gill 2007; Negra 2008)) and, perhaps most importantly, an ironic awareness of contemporary sexism. In this respect, a postfeminist identification is very much the privilege of well‐educated (usually heterosexual and white) women who are able to maintain an ironic stance towards contemporary culture because they are fortunate enough to live in sophisticated societies which ‘get’ the joke (Richardson and Wearing 2014, pp. 29–32). However, the British context of postfeminism brings a particular angle to these debates. First, there is the strand of ‘ladette‐ism’ (sometimes described as ‘girl power’ – à la Spice Girls) which described young women’s response to the culture of ‘new laddism’ (see next section) in which young women adopted laddish ­behaviour. Many of the tenets of ‘ladette’ culture – boisterousness; overt sexuality, and an aggressive assertion on a woman’s right to masculine impropriety (Whelehan 2000, p. 9) – were not only young women claiming a right to masculine ‘badness’ but were also a reaction to the perceived restraints of second‐wave feminism (Smith 2013, p. 143). In British cinema, Justin Ashby argues that a film such as Bend it Like Beckham may be read as an exemplary ‘ladette’ or ‘girl power’ movie, framing a rite of passage narrative within an ‘upbeat, postfeminist idiom’ (Ashby 2005, p. 130). However, as Angela Smith argues, British postfeminism is not characterised solely by its sensibilities of ‘girl power’ and ‘ladette’ culture but also by ‘a resurgence of a form of traditional femininity in the middle‐class “lady” mould’ (Smith 2013, p.  139). Smith labels this paradigm of postfeminism, in which a performance of middle‐class femininity is deemed more empowering than the ladette’s claim to masculine boisterousness and impropriety, as ‘lady power’ (2013, p. 141). Indeed, it is this return to middle‐class feminine restraint and decorum – articulated by earlier films such as Brief Encounter  –  which can be seen to shape a number of ­discourses in contemporary British Cinema and popular culture. While make‐over shows such as What Not To Wear and Ladette to Lady aim to impose a type of Laura Jesson middle‐class femininity on unruly, working‐class women (Smith 2013, p. 139), British cinema has also articulated these paradigms in a number of contemporary films. Indeed, a number of recent British films have not only attained critical attention for foregrounding a number of older actresses in leading roles but for representing heroines who articulate a type of ‘old‐fashioned’ femininity. Films such as Ladies in Lavender (2004), Tea with Mussolini (1999), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2014) and, the most obvious example, The Queen (2006), feature leading female characters who embody a similar sensibility to the one represented by Brief Encounter’s Laura Jesson. The Queen, for example, sets up the same tendentious binary that is articulated in Brief Encounter in which Queen Elizabeth represents middle‐class restraint in opposition to the Flames of Passion excess embodied by Princess Diana. Set at the time of Diana’s death,

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The  Queen is an attempt to articulate Queen Elizabeth’s response to the mass ­hysteria surrounding Diana’s death (see Turnock 2000) and to challenge many of the public perceptions held about the Royal Family’s treatment of the ‘People’s Princess’. In one key sequence, news footage of Diana’s famous statement of how she would like to be a ‘queen of people’s hearts’ cuts to an image of the Queen watching this on television while dressed in her fluffy, pink dressing gown and ­slippers. As Josephine Dolan points out, the iconography is designed to challenge the ‘victim’ status usually attributed to Diana by representing the princess as a ­‘calculating, celebrity divorcee’ while the Queen, usually deemed the oppressive matriarch in the relationship, is depicted as an ‘ordinary, slightly fragile old lady’ (Dolan 2012, p. 56). Throughout the film, the Queen’s sense of public duty is ‘matched by a keen grandmotherly responsibility’ (Dolan 2012, p. 57), thus conflating the idea of the Queen’s love for her family with love for the British public, as opposed to Diana who is represented as only having love for herself. In one of the key speeches of the film, the Queen – in words which could have been spoken by Brief Encounter’s Laura Jesson – stresses the importance of caring for her grandchildren, and grieving in a private, restrained manner, rather than dashing to London to take part in some ‘circus’. The film’s mise‐en‐scène (like Brief Encounter) conflates this sensibility of feminine restraint and decorum with the paradigms of art by associating the Queen throughout the film with paintings (‘fine’ art) while Diana is linked to grainy televisual images in MTV‐style editing (see Merck 2013). However, a key aspect of postfeminism is its irony or, as I have even labelled it in other representations, campness (Richardson 2006) so that this sensibility of ‘old‐fashioned’ femininity is not didactic in the film text but represented with a degree of self‐referentiality. In this respect, an important element of the film is the casting of Helen Mirren in the role of Queen Elizabeth (Dolan 2012; Vidal 2012; Merck 2013). Dame Helen Mirren not only connotes quality acting (like Dames Dench and Smith, Mirren is deemed a master of the craft) but, unlike other women of her age, Mirren is also associated with ‘rebellious sexiness’ (Merck 2013, p. 157) given her famous theatrical role in Miss Julie and, more recently, her roles in the films Calendar Girls and RED (see Varies 2009; Wearing 2012). In this respect, there is a certain ironic playfulness at work in the film’s coding. This is gorgeous, sexy Helen Mirren dressed in the fuddy‐duddy pink dressing gown, clutching a hot water bottle to her chest, and articulating such old‐fashioned ideologies. Indeed, this sense of self‐referentiality is emphasised in the opening sequence which represents the Queen sitting for a portrait. At the end of this sequence, the Queen, dressed in full robes, turns and gazes directly into the camera (in the type of Brechtian action often associated with Tilda Swinton) thus foregrounding the actor performing the role. This element of irony is also emphasised in the portrait scene by casting Earl Cameron (famous for his roles in 1950s racial ­melodramas – notably Sapphire [1959]) as the painter Mr. Crawford. Crawford is chatting with the Queen about the appointment of Blair as Prime Minster and he articulates a reluctance to see Great Britain ‘modernise’ because, in his opinion,



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Britain is in danger of losing all that is great about the nation. By giving the words of anti‐modernisation to an actor whose film characters have suffered extreme ­racism is, yet again, another attempt by the film to ‘soften’ its ideology of old‐fashioned ­traditionalism. In other words, the two characters who hark back to days of restraint and modesty are the Queen (played by sexy Mirren) and Crawford (played by an actor whose film roles have shown how cruel and racist 1950s conservative Britain could be). It is this double signification, this playfulness, which takes the sting out of postfeminist ideologies (MacDonald 1995, p. 100) and ­permits a film text to articulate gender politics which are, arguably, very regressive. This section has considered two films which, although separated by more than 60 years, can be read as celebrating the same type of middle‐class, British f­ emininity which is not only white and hetero‐feminine but modest and restrained (Skeggs 1997, p. 82). Both films represent women who are forced into a Janus‐like position in which they try to adhere to standards of traditional femininity but yet are pressurised by the requirements of modern life. It is interesting that this tension between tradition and modernity, which Alison Light terms ‘conservative ­modernity’, is often embodied by women in British popular culture (Light 1991). It is possible to read this either as foregrounding the importance of femininity or, on the other hand, to make the very opposite interpretation and argue that embodying this discourse within femininity, and within the genre of the feminine melodrama, is simply another level of irony which dilutes the very importance of these cultural politics. After all, it is very easy for the spectator to shrug his/her shoulders and dismiss both Brief Encounter and The Queen as only ‘chick flicks’.

Boys Don’t Do Ballet: Britain’s Effeminophobia? The study of masculinity in film has come from a different political standpoint from the analysis of femininity – not least because (heterosexual, white) men have never needed a political movement to advance their social, political, and cultural rights. Therefore, while early feminist film scholarship arose from an activist determination to chart and investigate the stereotypes of femininity found in popular culture, the same political move has never been required for masculinity. However, a consideration of how mainstream cinema may be read as a cultural barometer, chronicling the shifting discourses in masculine identification, has inspired critical discussion – not least in relation to issues of class and effeminacy. Andrew Spicer (2003) argues that cinematic representations of masculinity have charted the changes in British hegemonic masculinity and he has detailed how the heroic ‘debonair gentleman’ was succeeded by the ‘civilian professional’ (2003, pp. 28–64) but that the ‘comic everyman’, the working‐class archetype, would also compete to become an unofficial hero of British popular culture. Although British cinema featured the middle‐ to upper‐class gentleman, representations from the 1930s onwards did

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start to exalt a particular type of working‐class masculinity. As Colls and Dodd argue about the documentary tradition, films such as Coalface (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935) represented ‘virile, heterosexual, working class masculinity’ not simply as something that was welcomed into the nation but that this type of ‘masculinity might serve to incarnate’ the national ideal itself (Colls and Dodd 1985, pp. 24–25). Indeed, an important discourse within British culture has been its celebration of working‐class men and its distrust of effete and effeminate middle‐ to upper‐class masculinity. Alan Sinfield (1994) has researched the discourses underpinning the British suspicion of effeminacy through his meticulously argued analysis of Oscar Wilde – a Victorian‐era British playwright and author who, in a time predating the mass media, could also be identified as one of the first ‘celebrities’. Sinfield argued that Wilde, prior to his public disgrace and imprisonment for crimes of sodomy, was not identified as gay but merely as an upper‐middle‐class dandy or fop. The dandy’s effeminacy was not read as the signifier of homosexuality but merely as the performance of middle‐class laxity. It was only after Wilde’s very public disgrace that there was a publicly acknowledged conflation of effeminacy and homosexuality. What ensued after Wilde’s downfall was a form of mild panic among the middle‐class dandies as now ‘leisure class men might fall under suspicion, regardless of their actual preferences’ (Sinfield 1994, p. 137). However, this anxiety seems to have been a problem only of the middle classes as it was leisure‐class effeminacy which became conflated with homosexuality. Working‐ class masculinity, by contrast, signified heterosexuality (Sinfield 1994, p. 145). Arguably, one element that may have helped shape this discourse was the fact that Wilde often had sex with lower‐class men in exchange for money. In this respect, lower‐class men may have been identified as acting out of the need for money rather than any sexual desire so that ‘the lower‐class boy might have same‐sex experiences with others of his own class, but need not regard them as involving a queer identity  –  because, after all, it was the leisure‐class men that had that’ (Sinfield 1994, p. 145). Although Sinfield’s research has been criticised (see Healy 1996), it does seem that a certain performance of working‐class masculinity ­‘exonerates’ a man from the identification of queerness. Given this conflation of Wildean‐class effeminacy with homosexuality, it is fair to argue that much effeminophobia is simply a veiled form of homophobia. Yet, as I have argued (Richardson 2009a, 2009b), effeminacy can also promote a certain anxiety in itself. First, the effeminate man is renouncing masculine privilege by ‘doing’ femininity but, more importantly, effeminacy draws attention to gender as a performative effect. Effeminacy shows that masculinity is not the inherent property of male bodies. For this reason, I have argued that much homophobia should often be described as effeminophobia as the anxiety articulated in homophobic terms of abuse may often be a fear of male effeminacy rather than same sex sexual activity (Richardson 2009a). For example, when 11‐year‐old schoolboys use homophobic insults against one of their peers in the school playground, they are not suggesting that another 11‐year‐old boy is sexually gay. Instead, terms such as



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‘poof ’ or ‘fag’ denote non‐conformity to salient masculine tropes as perhaps this ‘fag’ is good at performing arts, dance, or music rather than activities identified as traditionally masculine (see Paecheter 1998; Pascoe 2011). While it is true that effeminophobia pervades Western culture, the cultural legacy of Wilde – and the particular conflation of homosexuality with leisure‐class identification – give this discourse a specifically British nuance. For example, this discourse of effeminophobia (in which effeminacy in itself is the issue rather than its assumed signified of homosexuality) has shaped many of the representations of masculinity throughout British cinema and popular culture. As Medhurst has argued (1992), effeminacy has been a staple source of humour in British comedy so that one continuous joke in the Carry On genre is that the characters played by Charles Hawtree and Kenneth Williams are coded as effeminate but yet identified in the narrative as heterosexual. Therefore, the spectator is not being asked to laugh at effeminacy as suggestive of homosexuality but at effeminacy itself. Characters such as Frank Spencer from the television sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em through to Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View could be identified in the same way, given that much of the humour arises from their effeminacy while the narrative asserts that they are heterosexually identified. Most importantly, this comedic trope has been permitted in mainstream culture because the conflation of British effeminacy and class gives the spectator, who does not wish even to acknowledge homosexuality, an alternative reading of the characters. For example, any of the characters played by Williams in the Carry On films may be interpreted as socially aspirant working‐class men who are feigning what they believe to be middle‐class gentility and therefore the humour could be these ­characters’ failure to social climb. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that much of British cinema evidences an anxiety about the feminine – irrespective of whether it is performed by male or female bodies. One of the most distinctive and critically acclaimed moments in British popular culture was the staging in 1956 of John Osborne’s highly influential Look Back In Anger – a play which would inspire a new generation of writers, known collectively as Angry Young Men, whose plays and novels would be adapted into films identified as the British New Wave. As John Hill (1986) argues, throughout the narratives of the British New Wave films is an anxiety about the feminine. For example, a distrust of new, mass‐produced popular culture (and television tends to be the metonym here) features in many of the films but this mass‐produced culture is represented as not only destroying the traditional family unit but also emasculating the male characters (Hill 1986, p. 153). Most importantly, this dangerous mass culture is coded as feminine. For example, A Kind of Loving features a sequence where the film edits from the ‘quality’ traditional, working‐class culture of the all‐male brass band (which is performing its music well) to the mindless, poorly‐ made television quiz show consumed by Ingrid and her dragonesque mother (Hill 1986, p. 155). The point is that not only is new mass‐produced entertainment silly and incompetently produced but it is coded as feminine and, most worryingly,

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is emasculating the film’s hero. As such, this sequence is not merely a critique of how mass‐produced popular culture is destroying the family and traditional British values but is, arguably, a finely tuned misogyny (see Harper 2000, p. 95). Yet, this anxiety is not so much an essentialist fear of women but a fear of a particular type of (e)feminisation. As Medhurst has argued, the Angry Young Men movement was distinguished by its ‘scorn for “effeminacy”’ (2006, p. 201) so that the feminine – whether performed by male or female bodies – was a source of anxiety within these texts (see also Berberich 2007, p. 73). In many ways, the movement of the Angry Young Men and the British New Wave can be read as reacting against the stigma of middle‐class effeminacy. Arguably, this trope has continued throughout British cinema but recently it has become the explicit subject in British popular culture, in the identification of New Laddism, and the subject matter of recent films such as Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Billy Elliot (2000). New Laddism was the distinctly British response to the identification of New Masculinity, a flimsy label attached to a number of representations in popular culture which featured a type of man who appeared to reject machismo and embrace his role as more a sensitive pro‐feminist and, most importantly, well‐ groomed erotic object (see Rutherford 1992; Nixon 1996, 2001; Edwards 1997). However, when advertisers discovered that they could sell products by appealing to male sexism, rather than the idea of pro‐feminist sensitivity, the backlash to New Masculinity occurred (see Edwards 1997; Monk 2000). The discourses of New Laddism are associated with the magazine Loaded and as such became a very British response to New Masculinity characterised by ‘a renaissance of Benny Hill style “naughtiness” and “schoolboy vulgarity”’(Whelehan 2000, pp. 65–66). However, as Bethan Benwell has argued, New Lad culture was not only a vicious backlash against feminism but a reaction against ‘middle‐class culture’ (2004, p. 6) and therefore a great deal of New Laddism has involved the emulation of working‐ class signifiers, even if the subject himself is middle class, such as the performance of a fake Cockney accent identified as Mockney. Yet, as the term Mockney itself suggests, New Laddism is distinguished by its playfulness and supposed irony. One of the ways in which Loaded magazine has excused some of its most sexist and misogynist remarks is by following them with a ‘just kidding’ exclamation. As Claire Monk (2000) has argued, we find this transition from New Masculinity to New Laddism at work in films like Brassed Off and The Full Monty. While Brassed Off is couched in discourses of New Masculinity (men shed an occasional tear while playing Danny Boy and there is one token woman allowed to join the all‐male brass band), the film still delights in sexist humour and codes its two older female bodies as characters akin to the comic relief of the Shakespearian fools. The Full Monty goes a stage further and satirises the very ideology of New Masculinity by affirming that a dance group of out‐of‐shape men (a far cry from the eroticised object of New Man iconography) can appeal to a crowd of female spectators just as much as a troupe of professional male dancers. The film even asks that these



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men be applauded for having the courage to challenge a few years of New Man discourse. As Susan Bordo has questioned, could a film be made that asks the ­spectator to applaud a group of out‐of‐shape women dancers (1999, p. 174)? However, the British film which has made these debates the very subject matter of its discourse, and has received considerable critical attention in this regard, is Billy Elliot (see Weber 2003; Hill 2004; Sinfield 2006; Alderson 2011). Billy Elliot focuses on the problems faced by a young, working‐class, Geordie boy who develops a passion for ballet dancing and has to contend with the negative perceptions his family and community hold about male ballet dancers. While Brassed Off and The Full Monty maintained an interest in gender politics, as a substratum of the film, in Billy Elliot, masculinity is the subject matter while the industrial politics of the 1980s miners’ strike are relegated to the film’s background. Like The Fully Monty and Brassed Off, Billy Elliot is an example of ‘alternative heritage cinema’ (Powrie 2000) and, at some points, may even be read as satirising the visual style of heritage. For example, in the sequence where Billy visits the ballet school, the grandeur of the building’s atrium is not the standard heritage‐establishing shot, usually ‘divorced from character point of view’ (Higson 2003, p. 38) in order to stress the grandeur of the architecture, but is instead representing a child’s point of view shot so that the school entrance hall is not beautiful but looming and foreboding. Billy Elliot is particularly interesting for the way it deliberately avoids identifying Billy’s sexuality but instead makes its focus the issue of gender  –  especially ­effeminacy (Figure 19.2). One of the key elements of the film is the rather heavy‐ handed inclusion of Billy’s defining other – his gender‐dissident friend, Michael. As Sinfield has argued, Michael is a form of ‘inoculation’ (2006, p. 166). In other words, the inclusion of one overtly queer character makes Billy seem straight not

Figure 19.2  Effeminophobia?: Billy Elliot (2000).

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only by comparison but also because the spectator would assume there couldn’t possibly be two queers in the same film. Yet what is interesting is that Michael is not coded as gay but as incipiently transgender. In this respect, the film makes it clear that its agenda is not actually an interrogation of homophobia but an examination of effeminophobia. It is for this reason that a film which is supposed to be about the art of ballet contains absolutely no representation of male ballet dancing at all (Sinfield 2006, p. 167). As John Hill has argued, Billy’s dancing bears more resemblance to tap or folk rather than ballet (2004, p. 104) and indeed Billy often dances when he becomes exceptionally angry so that his kicks and flicks often look as if he is lashing out in rage, and dance is coded as a metaphor for masculine aggression rather than artistic expression. Yet, like all contemporary cinema, Billy Elliot is distinguished by its irony and playfulness and there are a number of intertextual jokes such as the lauding of Wayne Sleep’s athleticism, in which the characters are unaware that Sleep is one of the few male ballet dancers who actually identifies as gay, and references to how Billy is Durham’s Gene Kelly (Hill 2004, p. 104), a dancer who, although being revered for his masculinity (Clover 1995), has been subject to considerable queer revision in recent years (Cohan 2004; Doty 1995). In short, the film seems to assert that the characters’ anxiety lies with (e)ffeminacy rather than homosexuality. Billy’s sexual identification is never confirmed in the film and although there is one sequence where Billy punches the boy at the ballet school, while accusing him of being a ‘bent bastard’, it is unclear if this aggression is premised against homosexuality or if Billy is merely coding his class anxiety into a commonplace masculine insult (see Alderson 2011, p. 16), reminiscent of the schoolboy effeminophobia cited earlier. Indeed, Billy Elliot, more than any of the other films, articulates the British anxiety about middle‐classness and femininity. The only woman in the film (other than Billy’s grandmother who suffers from dementia) is Mrs Wilkinson, who, although coded as a fairy godmother figure (Lancioni 2006, p. 719), is notably absent from the grand finale in which the adult Billy performs in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Similarly, Mrs. Wilkinson’s husband – the only middle‐class man in the film (other than the headmaster of the ballet school) – is represented as an emasculated drunk who, in a reference to the British New Wave, is now sprawled in front of the television unable to do anything other than drink. However, the finale of Billy Elliot makes the film’s position on femininity very clear by virtue of the fact that the final sequence is all male. Mrs Wilkinson is nowhere to be seen and the ballet is Matthew Bourne’s all‐male production of Swan Lake. The only ‘token’ femininity represented is Michael who is now in the process of transitioning. As Billy moves to the stage wings, a male assistant removes his cloak which, as Weber argues (2003) is an action reminiscent of a boxing match (and therefore a fitting conclusion to the earlier pressure placed on Billy to engage in boxing rather than ballet) and the focus is not on the dance itself but the athletic leap that Billy makes onto the stage. The key point is that this happy ending is an all‐male environment in which femininity is excluded so that even the femininity



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usually required in ballet itself has been removed through Bourne’s all‐male (and softly homoerotic) production. Arguably, this is not misogyny as such – given that the film’s agenda has been to combat the perceptions and stereotypes of ballet and male dancing (see Burt 1995; Fisher and Shay 2009). Yet, rather than representing men, such as Billy’s father and brother, learning to have a respect for femininity, the film simply elides femininity from the discourse in order to exalt a homosocial, hyper‐masculine ‘happy ending’. If Billy’s father had expressed earlier the effeminophobic statement that ‘boys don’t do ballet’, we have to wonder why the film, if it is trying to challenge this, doesn’t actually show the spectator any ballet? In many ways, Billy Elliott may be read as articulating the same discourse identified by Colls and Dodd in relation to images from the 1930s who argued that working‐class, athletic masculinity was represented as an ideal. Although Billy Elliot cloaks this representation in issues of working‐class men trying to accept a boy doing ballet, the final sequence is a return to an unashamed exaltation of a particular type of muscular, working‐class masculinity.

There’s Something Queer Here: From Victims to Queers to Post‐gays Although queer readings have been in circulation surrounding a number of queer ‘authored’ texts such as Brief Encounter (Medhurst 1991), there have been relatively few analyses of representations of gays and lesbians in British cinema pre‐1960 (Bourne 1996; Doty 2006; Medhurst 2006). As Medhurst points out, this lack of critical writing is simply because looking for queers in pre‐gay British film ‘might qualify as the safest sex ever invented’ (2006, p. 21). Therefore, most critics agree that Victim (1961) marked a ‘watershed moment’ (Medhurst 2006, p. 23) in being not only the first British film ‘to centre its narrative around male homosexuality’ (Medhurst 1984, p. 22) but also to be the first mainstream, Anglophone film to make any attempt to ‘defend homosexuality’ (Dyer 1993b, p. 71). Various critics (Medhurst 1984; Hill 1986) have examined how the film illuminated the 1957 Wolfenden Report which had advocated the (partial) de‐criminalisation of homosexuality and, in many ways, Victim can be read as a contribution to socio‐political and medical debates that had been occurring about homosexuality since the 1950s (Medhurst 1984, p. 25). Although the Wolfenden Report did reject the idea of homosexuality as a sickness or contagious disease, it did further the idea of same‐sex attraction as being a ‘condition’ – somewhat similar to the early medical model of disability. Obviously, this ideology is offensive to contemporary society (my students are horrified when I reveal details of the Wolfenden Report), but it should be stressed that the very rejection of the concept of homosexuality as a disease was progressive for the period. Although much of the critical writing on Victim has focused on the context of the film and its textual details, some cross‐cultural

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comparisons can demonstrate quite how daring Victim was for its time. Compared to a US public service broadcast film from the same year (1961)  –  Boys Beware: Homosexuals Are on the Prowl – the progressive ideology of the Wolfenden Report and Victim can be gauged. Boys Beware is a short US film warning young men about the ‘dangerous’ and ‘predatory’ homosexuals who are lurking in everyday places. It narrates how the teenager Jimmy meets the much, much older, sunglasses‐wearing Ralph (sunglasses were, apparently, a useful disguise for ‘predatory homosexuals’) and they become friends. The climax of the film occurs when the narrator reveals that: What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious – a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.

There are a number of terrifying misconceptions articulated here. First, the film confuses (or deliberately conflates?) homosexuality with paedophilia by representing the teenage Jimmy being lured into danger by the middle‐aged Ralph. Second, Boys Beware asserts that homosexuality is a disease which is highly contagious. The implication is that Jimmy may now have caught this sickness from prolonged exposure to Ralph. The use of smallpox as a simile must be read as deliberate given that, in the 1950s, smallpox (once a great terror of society) had been eradicated through medical developments and the implication is that, with time, medical science would also succeed in destroying the disease of homosexuality or, at the very least, invent a vaccine against it. Placed beside Boys Beware, Victim seems decades ahead of the film’s prejudice and misconceptions. As opposed to homosexuality‐as‐contagion, Victim was remarkable for showing that homosexuality existed in ‘all walks of life’ and ‘in otherwise normal and socially well‐adjusted characters’, so that ‘it is homosexuality which appears to be normal, if only by sheer prevalence’ (Hill 1986, p. 92). Medhurst has also argued that the passion demonstrated by Bogarde’s coming‐out speech, in which his character declares his sexual desire for a man, emphasises that homosexuality is a sexual emotion rather than some sort of sickness in which unfortunate degenerates are compelled to grab onto the first male body they can find. Here, ‘the strength of Bogarde’s delivery’ (Medhurst 1984, p. 31) actually gives homosexual desire a voice and, as Medhurst has argued, this scene ‘borders on the revolutionary’ (1984, p. 32). Although Victim is flawed (Dyer points out that there is a coding of ‘deformity’ (1993b, p. 81) at work in the representation of the gay world), the film does make definite attempts to ‘defend homosexuality’ (Dyer 1993b, p. 71). Similar claims of political progression could also be argued about the representation of queer politics which would erupt on the British screen several decades later with the highly controversial imagery of the director often identified as the



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‘godfather of queer cinema’ – Derek Jarman. Queer as a politics (and later as a sustained academic, critical framework) was founded on a number of principles. First, it was a response to the pandemic of AIDS and the government’s perceived apathy about addressing the situation. Second, it was the reclamation of a term of abuse, proving that words themselves have no power to hurt, and a pride in something that had been a source of shame. Third, it was a challenge to perceived lesbian and gay lethargy – especially middle‐class gays and lesbians who merely wished to be ‘tolerated’ and had carved out comfortable niches in well‐to‐do metropolitan settings. If being gay simply denoted a sexual preference and lifestyle choice, then queer was certainly political (Bersani 1995, p. 2). Finally, and arguably this is where queer theory rests, was queer’s challenge to fixed ideas of gender, sexuality, and sexual identification. Queer theory is largely underpinned by deconstruction and draws upon Butler’s thesis (1991) that gender is a performative effect (and therefore raising the question what is someone eroticising if gender is simply a flexible fiction?) and Sedgwick’s critique (1991) of the reductionist way of identifying sexuality simply in terms of sexual object choice (see Richardson 2009b, 2010; Richardson et al. 2013; Richardson and Wearing 2014). My own work on Derek Jarman (Richardson 2003, 2005, 2009b) argued that Jarman’s films, although sometimes dismissed as little more than an aggressive rally for Gay Liberation politics, were in fact challenging and queering ideas of gender and sexual identification. Although Jarman was perfectly happy to sell his own films short (Richardson 2011), I argued that his cinema was remarkable for the way it didn’t accommodate Gay Lib politics but often represented characters whose sexuality moved beyond traditional identifications. For example, while many journalists read Jarman’s Michelangelo da Caravaggio as simply a ‘rowdy homosexual’ (Conrad 2010), Caravaggio is actually representing a queer, triadic ­relationship between two men and a woman which not only moves in excess of a traditional homosocial triangle but queers a range of gay myths such as the sugar daddy/rough trade relationship (Richardson 2005) (Figure 19.3). Indeed, one of the most interesting icons of Jarman’s cinema has been Tilda Swinton, whose own ­distinct deployment of Brechtian acting technique can be read as an interrogation or deconstruction of an essentialist idea of femininity (Goodman 1990; Brabazon 1994) and, as I have also argued, may be seen as a challenge to the cliché of gay misogyny  –  again something often levelled at art produced by gay men (Richardson 2003). However, while Jarman was making highly interesting films, which queered gender, sexuality, sexual identifications, and the gendered nature of filmmaking itself, it must be remembered that his films were never mainstream, popular entertainment. This may be due to the fact that the kind of sexual politics which Jarman’s films deliver were only possible within a cinema that departs from the mainstream. Indeed, progressive representations of masculinity, femininity, and queerness often depend upon refashioning generic conventions, in order to disrupt the heteronormative bias of gendered spectatorship, as was evidenced in radical

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Figure 19.3  Something queer: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986).

feminist filmmaking. Understandably, Jarman’s unconventional film style has also inspired critical attention from critics who have who have been interested in his visual and narrative style more than his gender and sexuality politics (O’Pray 1996; Hill 1999; Wymer 2005). In view of the fact that Jarman’s cinema suggests the difficulty of representing queerness within mainstream, narrative cinema, it does seem remarkable that another form of queering (albeit much less aggressive) was taking place in heritage cinema from the mid‐1980s onwards. Jarman himself despised the heritage tradition, criticising Brideshead Revisited (1981) in a rather spiteful fashion ( Jarman 2010, p. 212) and many critics are also divided on the political importance that should be ascribed to the representation of queer love in heritage. While Dyer (2001), Monk (1995, 1997, 1999) and Michael Williams (2006) celebrate the representation of gay male passion in films such as A Room with a View and Maurice (1987) (especially sequences which fissure the heteronormative landscape by figuring queer desire in the midst of middle‐class Edwardian culture), other critics have argued that heritage films contain the threat of queerness by turning it into yet another element of fetishised heritage iconography (Davis 2006). Indeed, as Hill has pointed out, the political agenda of Forster’s original novels is diluted by the heritage spectacle so that, for example, the narrative’s critique of the homophobic regimes of Cambridge is eclipsed by the sheer beauty of the university architecture (Hill 1999, p. 86). Yet, as Bruzzi has argued (2008, p. 135), the few scenes in Maurice which represent male same‐sex passion (such as the sequence between Maurice and Scudder) contrast with images of frustration and lack of fulfilment represented in male–female relationships such as the loveless marriage between Clive and Anne. A similar argument could



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be made about A Room with a View in which Lucy’s brother Freddy demonstrates a freedom of sexual expression which she wishes she could have so that a form of metaphoric doubling takes place (see Monk 1995). However, these arguments do run the risk of reinforcing the criticism that heritage projects an extremely male‐centred, homosocial world (Higson 2003, p. 114) where women are either marginalised, used as defining others or, even worse, identified as the very forces of constraint which are responsible for stifling sexual expression (Hill 1999, p. 94). Most importantly, as Dyer points out (2001), heritage cinema is much less about queerness (challenging sexual identifications, a response to HIV/AIDS, and a refusal to accept a ‘tolerated’ minority position) but instead focused, almost exclusively, on the gay male agenda. Dyer argues that underpinning many heritage films is the coming‐out narrative (2001, p. 207) and so the films are better read in accordance with the principles of Gay Liberation rather than Queer, given that Gay Lib placed great emphasis on the importance of coming out of the closet, finding a ‘true’ self, and identifying in terms of sexual object choice. In this respect, heritage  –  although reaching a much broader audience than Jarman  –  was not queering sexuality like Jarman but simply reinforcing a narrow prescription of Gay Lib politics. Arguably, the success of heritage (and its particular ‘brand’ of gay masculinity) can be seen as one of the reasons why so many recent gay‐themed British films have focused on the Gay Lib ideology of coming out of the closet to identify in terms of a ‘true’ gay identification. Bruzzi (2000, 2008) has examined recent films such as Priest (1994) and Love and Death on Long Island (1997) which, in the post‐heritage decades, can be read as a return to the politics of gay identification rather than the queerness proposed by Jarman and other queer cinema. Indeed, Love and Death on Long Island makes some witty intertextual jokes on the popularity of ­heritage cinema by featuring, as the hero, a fusty writer called Giles De’ath who, finding himself caught in a rainstorm, decides to take shelter in a cinema and watch the latest film adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel. In the auditorium, Giles realises that he has gone into the wrong screening and is not watching Forster but some sort of low‐brow 1980s comedy that can be read as a parody of the Hollywood Porky’s series. It is in this film, however, that Giles sees Z‐list actor Ronnie Bostock (played by Jason Priestley) and falls instantly in love with him. What ensues is a charming, although heart‐breakingly sad, story of unrequited love in which Giles’s desire forces him to self‐identify as gay and venture to Long Island to meet Ronnie. As can only be imagined, the climax of the film is Giles’s coming‐out speech in which he declares his love for Ronnie. Love and Death on Long Island can be read as an affectionate critique of many of the ideologies not only represented in heritage cinema but found within the existing critical discourses on the films. (The film’s director, Richard Kwietniewski was himself one of the first critics of heritage cinema [1988]). Giles represents the old‐fashioned, but well‐educated, middle‐class spectator assumed to be the consumer of heritage cinema (see Hipsky 1994). Yet Giles doesn’t fall in love with a Freddy Honeychurch or Alex Scudder but with another beautiful young actor

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who happens to be in a crass, macho American comedy. The joke is that much of the critics’ speculation on the assumed homoeroticism of heritage may well be over‐determined as it is possible to eroticise anything on the screen – even a young man who is covered in tomato ketchup, and sprawled on the counter of a fast‐food joint. The point is that equally homoerotic codings are taking place throughout popular culture – even macho, misogynist comedies and the action films of 1980s Hollywood  –  and that if hadn’t been for the assumed conservatism of heritage cinema, and its cachet of the label ‘quality’, then its brief encounters of gay love may not have attained the same critical attention.

Strategies of Containment Alan Sinfield famously argued that ‘the masculine/feminine binary was a ­historical wrong‐turn in western culture; it would be better if we could do without all that’ (2008, p. 110). Sadly, it doesn’t look as if we’re ever going to be able to ‘do without all that’ and class‐inflected discourses of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are still compelling identifications in British culture. This chapter has tried to tease out some key discourses running through mainstream British cinema (middle‐class femininity, effeminophobia, and coming‐out narratives) in order to consider not only how British representations differ from other Anglophone popular culture but to stress that debates about British nationhood have often been gendered. If a certain type of middle‐class femininity has been viewed as a symbol of appropriate British national identification, it is interesting that it has often been the working‐ class masculine body that has been exalted as a symbol of the British nation state. Yet while British cinema’s focus on working‐class masculinity and middle‐class femininity does deserve critical praise, it should not be forgotten that these particular discourses still contain these identifications. Brief Encounter may well foreground female desire but the film’s heroine is still restricted by societal norms in which her social class constrains any real potential for transgression. The Queen may exalt a particular type of restrained femininity but still emphasises that the monarch must bow to the requirements of the middle‐class, male government. As I have argued elsewhere, exalting a particular type of middle‐class femininity has the effect of policing women so that popular culture, such as talk shows and make‐ over shows, often represent the female body that does not adhere to middle‐class feminine propriety as disgusting, if not even dangerous (see Richardson 2010, and also Birmingham 2000). Although postfeminism may sell the idea of ‘lady power’ as empowerment, it may simply be another way of containing the threat of ­transgressive femininity. Similarly, a type of working‐class masculinity is revered, if not even fetishised in British popular culture, but yet these bodies are still trapped within their lowly positions in which social mobility is extremely limited. The narrative may assert



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that Billy Elliot has become a successful dancer but yet the iconography still ­contains him within the spectacle of working‐class physicality in which ballet is coded as athleticism. However, the very fact that British cinema actually makes these discourses the explicit subject matter of the films is, at the very least, a challenge to hegemonic ideologies. By asking if boys can do ballet and be masculine; if coming‐out is still a political struggle in post‐gay culture and if the Janus‐like discourse of middle‐class femininity will still be the cultural inscription for women in post‐postfeminist society, British cinema raises an awareness of these discourses and asks the ­spectator to consider if the masculine/feminine binary was indeed ‘a historical wrong‐turn in Western culture’.

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Space, Place, and Architecture in British Films The Case of Last Resort (2000) Paul Newland Introduction Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Last Resort (2000) tells the story of a young Russian ­illustrator, Tanya (Dina Korzun), and her son, Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov), who arrive in a darkly rendered contemporary Britain. Tanya claims political asylum at an anonymous airport, and the pair are subsequently transported to a refugee holding centre in the fictional Stonehaven, a shabby, drab, remote, coastal town, where they find out they that will be detained for at least 12 months while their case is processed by the authorities. They meet a local young man, Alfie (Paddy Considine), who helps them to cope in their confinement in a barely furnished flat, high up in a looming, grey, brutalist tower near a dilapidated amusement park. Noticing the film’s realistic elements but also its essentially fabricated nature, Alice Bardan argues that Last Resort is a ‘false documentary’ on asylum seekers (Bardan 2008, p. 57). It is true that the seaside town in which the film was shot, Margate (which has a population of approximately 45 000), has housed asylum seekers in recent years – approximately 3000 have been ‘displaced’ there (Roberts 2002, p. 88). But Last Resort does not provide an accurate depiction of the lives of such individuals. Instead, the film draws on and reconfigures the socio‐cultural, historical, semiotic, and mythical properties of the ‘real’ Margate in order to construct a fictional Stonehaven as an uncanny, hybrid place (Margate and not Margate). In some ways, despite some of the evident social‐realist aesthetic qualities of the film (such as the ways in which it uses real locations), the Stonehaven constructed in Last Resort feels like the space of science fiction. Indeed, Steven Allen reads it as being set in the near future (Allen 2008, p. 54). The film’s director, Pawlikowski, has also suggested this (Fitzgerald 2010, p. 97), despite the fact that it is never made A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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explicit in the narrative. It is perhaps precisely because of its evidently generic complexity – and, indeed, its spatial complexity – that Last Resort has attracted a significant amount of critical attention to date. I want to argue in this chapter that Last Resort is a key example of a range of films shot on location in Britain, from the mid to late 1990s onwards, that draw on but also renew approaches to urban location shooting that developed through the British documentary movement, the Free Cinema movement, and the British social‐realist tradition. Last Resort, like films such as Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1997), Twin Town (Kevin Allen, 1997), Orphans (Peter Mullan, 1998), Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007), and Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2008), incorporates shots of real urban ­locations in Britain that speak of and exemplify the struggle of working‐class or immigrant communities. But these films do not always function as straightforward, realistic depictions of these lives. Instead, by incorporating often complex and shifting, hybrid film aesthetics that can be suggestive of fantasy, dreams or symbolism, while also adhering to some traditions of British social realism, these films present contemporary places as fluidly complex, hybrid spaces of representation. This chapter will explore the representation of place in Last Resort within the contexts of a broader discussion of the history of representation of spaces and places on British film (including social realism). But I also want to try to extend these debates in new ways, by arguing that we need to further scrutinise the ways in which specific architecture shot on location operates in British films at the level of spatial representation. I will argue that Last Resort draws much of its representational power from the ways in which it employs the semiotic potential of Margate architecture to speak of the struggle of its central character, Tanya. I will also demonstrate that, even more than contemporary British films such as Fish Tank and Red Road (which explore the dramatic and imaginative potential of the architecture of social housing in poorer areas of British cities), Last Resort effectively foregrounds the semiotic power of architecture. As such, through this intense focus on architecture, but also its reinterpretation of the spatial aesthetics of the tradition of British social realism, Last Resort is a film that can illuminate debates about how places shot on location in contemporary British films have developed a complex spatiality. But first I want to chart key debates concerning the ways in which British cinema has depicted British places and constructed representational spaces.

Debates on Space, Place and British Film Martin Lefebvre argues that ‘Every unit of meaning in a film – whether an action, a view of an object, etc. – implies a setting (or settings)’ (2006, p. 21). Therefore, implicit in any narrative film is the presence of, creation of, and requirement of

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space in which narrative can unfold (Higson 1996, p. 134). British film scholars have fairly often written about film locations, and in doing so have generally tended to critique the employment of these real places (or known points in ‘space’) and to argue that these locations can be seen to have discernible meanings that frame the experiences of characters, individuals, groups and/or communities in films (see, for example, Nowell‐Smith 2000, p. 14; Chibnall and Petley 2007, p. 213). Until recently, most of this critical inquiry has tended to focus on issues of the city and urban locales in Britain, and has often engaged with how complex issues of modernity are effectively worked though in such spaces. Here, for example, we might consider the work of John Orr (2002), Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2003), and Charlotte Brunsdon (2007) on the representation of London on film. Brunsdon (2007) and Newland (2008), for example, focus their attention on the ways in which London has so often been depicted on film as a bifurcated city split between east and west, where the East End has long been seen to be a space of immigrants, the working classes, crime and criminality in films as narratively and aesthetically wide‐ranging as Pandora’s Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929), The Long Good Friday ( John Mackenzie, 1980) and From Hell (Allen and Albert Hughes, 2002), while the West End has often been seen to be a space of commerce, consumerism, middle‐class lifestyles, and power. The perceived East End/West End socio‐cultural split is at the heart of the spatial properties of some films, as seen, for example, in Piccadilly (E.A Dupont, 1929). There are many other examples of how London operates as a filmic space. We should note that it functions in Last Resort as Tanya’s idealised destination, so the spatiality of Stonehaven is contingent on the affective presence (but also absence) of the capital. But a number of scholars have noticed the development of a fantasy representation of the city in films that appeared around the new millennium (see Church Gibson 2003; Brunsdon 2007; Murphy 2009). Successful films such as Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999) and Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998) offer a vision of ‘posh London’ (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2003); a ‘global city’ (Brunsdon 2007, p. 111) exemplified by a shiny, bourgeois, millennial niceness that often showcases grand buildings and familiar tourist landmarks. However, critical enquiry into British cities on film has tended to approach these cities as a broadly imagined socio‐cultural entities (or, indeed, as ‘way of life’, or even as ‘modes of perception’), and has not, as such, focused on the historical meanings, representational force, and semiotic qualities of specific architecture. I will do this in my discussion of Last Resort. Rural spaces and places have also played a range of key representational roles in British films. For example, in 1930s film melodramas such as The Water Gypsies (Maurice Elvey, 1931), The Constant Nymph (Basil Dean, 1933) and The Mill on the Floss (Tim Whelan, 1937), the rural landscape can be read as an ‘index of sexual and social conservatism’ (Harper 2010, p. 151). Later, in morale‐boosting wartime documentary films such as Britain at Bay (Harry Watt, 1940), Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, 1942), and Summer on the Farm



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(Ralph Keene, 1943), the rural landscape was usually employed in the service of the War effort, and, as such, for the perceived common good (Harper 2010, p. 153). At the same time, wartime fiction films often depicted pastoral places as spatial representations of ways of life that needed to be protected and indeed fought for. Key examples here are This England (David MacDonald, 1941), Tawny Pipit (Bernard  Miles and Charles Saunders, 1944), and A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell  and Emeric Pressburger, 1944), a film that offers a prime example of a ­representation of the southern English rural landscape (in this case Kent) as a space of bucolic reverie. Most of the published research into representations of rural space in British cinema since the 1980s has focused on the British heritage film genre. Archetypal heritage films – such as Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993) – tend to depict a vision of a primarily English rural landscape of the past that spatially encapsulates a nostalgic, rose‐tinted view of the countryside, and, through this, traditional (and broadly conservative) aspects of English culture and society. As Andrew Higson puts it, in films such as these, the past is displayed as ‘visually spectacular pastiche’ inviting a ‘nostalgic gaze’ that ‘resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively’ (Higson 2006, p. 91). In these heritage films, rural spaces are often initially presented through the employment of beautiful, extreme long shots that show these spaces to be controlled and largely peaceful (Cardwell 2006, p. 26). It has been noted in critical work on British heritage cinema that filmed ‘real’ places can enhance the enjoyment of narratives. But often, filmed locations might be enjoyed in their own right. In her History of British Film, 1906–1914 (1949), for example, Rachael Low suggested that there were two distinct lines of early development in British filmmaking: the ‘pictorial’ and the ‘narrative’. Films with a primary interest in the beauty of pictorial composition can be traced through the work of filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth and Maurice Elvey (Low 1949, pp.  247–248). In these films there are several instances of landscapes appearing to be composed and/or staged for the camera (and thus for the enjoyment of the spectator) on their own terms. That is, these shots of places do not always o ­ bviously perform important narrative functions. In their mid‐1980s examinations of the British New Wave cycle of social‐realist films (from the late 1950s to the early 1960s), both John Hill and Andrew Higson engaged with the apparent realism and spectacle evident in shots of places in films. Following Rachael Low, Higson works through the tensions that British New Wave films develop between representations of specific locations as effectively ‘real’ places on the one hand and the ways in which these operate as representational ‘spaces’ on the other. Although British New Wave films were promoted as realist, Higson points out that landscape and townscape shots in these films ‘must always be much more than neutral narrative spaces. Each of these location shots demands also to be read as a real historical place which can authenticate the fiction’ (Higson 1996, p. 134). But while real locations provide the British New Wave

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social‐realist narratives with a sense of authenticity, then, ‘place becomes a signifier of character, a metaphor for the state of mind of the protagonists in the well‐ worn conventions of the naturalist tradition’ (Higson 1996, p. 134). In such a way, the real places captured by the camera lend a tangible sense of authenticity to the narrative spaces constructed in these films. Importantly, Higson also notices how some memorable shots in these social‐ realist films exceed the requirements of the narrative and are instead effectively coded as spectacular. One example is what Higson (following John Krish) refers to as ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’ – a generic, held, long shot of an urban landscapes that recurs in a number of British New Wave films. One such example can be found in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), described by Higson as ‘a series of three shots [that] move from a spectacular townscape (a view not seen before in the film) taken from a high camera position, dissolving to a high angle long shot of the backyards of two rows of terraced houses’ (Higson 1996, p. 139). But although these images are coded as spectacular, they also still have a strong relationship with the narrative system of these films, and thus conform to the logic of the preceding and following point‐of‐view shots and establishing shots (Higson 1996, p. 138). John Hill also notices the preponderance of pictorial shots of places in British New Wave films, pointing out that in A Kind of Loving (1962), ‘It is the places, rather than actions, which are marked out by the style and command the viewers’ attention’ (Hill 1986 , p. 131). Furthermore, ‘place in these films is accredited an autonomy and “integrity” outside the demands of the narrative, authenticating their claim, in doing so, to be more adequately “realistic” (and “outside” mere story‐telling)’ (Hill 1986, pp. 131–132). Interestingly, Hill reads these shots as evidence of authorial view: ‘it is not the “actuality” that impresses, but its “creative treatment”’ (Hill 1986, p. 132). So, shots of ‘real’ places in these films lend a sense of authenticity to the narratives while at the same time operating as spectacle; that is, they are being presented for the spectators’ enjoyment through their evident aestheticisation (Figure 20.1). In some ways Last Resort can be read within the context of these traditions of British New Wave (and more broadly social‐realist) British cinema and critical debates concerning the construction of place and space in these films. After all, it also incorporates shots of seemingly humdrum, quotidian, ‘real’ places such as the beach, the amusement park, and the bingo hall in order to construct a representational space in which the narrative can unfold. Furthermore, Last Resort features a number of static, staged shots of Margate that would no doubt conform to Low’s notion of the pictorial and Hill and Higson’s notion of landscape as spectacle in British New Wave films. This is particularly the case with the recurring shots of the Arlington House tower in the film, as we will see. But Last Resort is not a straightforward social‐realist film in the vein of the British New Wave. Just as it depicts a hybrid space, it is composed of hybrid aesthetics. John Orr notices that Last Resort echoes other contemporary European films that display a post‐Bazinian form of realism exemplified by the employment of the



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Figure 20.1  Place in working‐class realism: A Kind of Loving (1962).

fast‐moving close shot which creates a ‘foregrounding of the subject’ (Orr 2002, p.  106). In addition to the held, pictorial shots of architectural spaces and landscapes in the film, then, Tanya is often trapped within the frames of tight, jerky, fast‐moving, disorientating hand‐held shots, which serve to evoke her entrapment and disorientation in Stonehaven. Claire Monk also argues that Last Resort is ‘characterised by deliberate, stylised choices of framing, composition, colour and cinematography that produce a “poetic” effect: a distinctive blend of the dreamlike, absurdist and super‐real’ (Monk 2012, p. 484). Here then we can see a potential move away from traditional British social‐realist aesthetics of the New Wave films towards the development of a more complicated, hybrid aesthetic which invokes an element of fantasy while nevertheless still always drawing on earlier social‐ realist traditions. It should be noted that hybridisation transformed British social‐realist ­filmmaking throughout 1980s and 1990s (see Hill 1999; Dave 2006). But such hybridisation developed more noticeably in a range of films that appeared from the late 1990s: films that often incorporate an element of the fantastic into otherwise recognisably social‐realist depictions of working‐class areas (and indeed architecture) of British cities, such as Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1997), Orphans (Peter Mullan, 1998), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), and Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2008). Last Resort can be read within the contexts of this hybridisation of an essentially traditional, social‐realist aesthetic on contemporary British cinema. But Last Resort is a particularly interesting example because of the ways in which it draws upon the complicated and sometimes even conflicted semiotic properties of key architectural structures, as I now want to move on to explore in more detail.

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Last Resort: Margate as Carnivalesque Space One of the key aspects of the town Stonehaven as represented in Last Resort is its strong sense of faded glory: its sense of a past heyday characterised by carnivalesque play that now endures only in ghostly traces. The rapid development of the British railway system during the mid‐nineteenth century enabled mass working‐class excursions to seaside towns for the first time. A number of towns such as Margate thrived during this period by primarily catering for the working classes, developing as sites of a specific, identifiable culture (Fiske 1989, p. 77) of popular entertainments, such as funfair rides. The growth of these seaside towns as popular destinations might be put down to the fact that Victorians were keen to regulate and control carnivalesque behaviour. As Mikhail Bakhtin put it in his seminal work on the carnivalesque: ‘Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth from the established order: it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’ (Bakhtin 1984, p. 10). The carnival has been characterised by laughter, excessiveness, bad taste, offensiveness, and degradation (Fiske 1989, pp. 81–82).1 And Rob Shields has written about the ‘ritual pleasures of a seaside resort’ (Shields 1991, p. 73; see also Roberts 2002, p.  86). Clearly, in Last Resort, Stonehaven was once such a site of temporary liberation and ritual pleasures. But now, while in some ways the town does seemingly have a lingering identity as a space of leisure, it also ironically operates as a space of temporary imprisonment. It is, again, a hybrid space in which the past, present, and possible future identities (and indeed meanings of designed and ­constructed places) are seen to collide. It is worth bearing in mind that seaside carnivalesque activity can be seen throughout British cinema history. For example, in Hindle Wakes (Maurice Elvey, 1927), Blackpool operates as a space in which ‘people abandon their normal inhibitions and let their sexual energy explode’ (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2003, p. 218). Furthermore, the British New Wave film A Taste of Honey (1960) features a sequence at a funfair. And the Blackpool pier can be seen in the honeymoon sequence in A Kind of Loving ( John Schlesinger, 1962), clearly visible from window of the room in which Vic (Alan Bates) and Ingrid ( June Ritchie) are staying. Margate, in particular, has long been depicted on film and television as a site of traditional, carnivalesque, working‐class English seaside shenanigans.2 And the Dreamland Amusement Park, which originally dates from 1863 (Walton 2000, p. 109), has long been central to these representations. Dreamland was captured in its heyday in the Free Cinema film O Dreamland (1953), in which the director Lindsey Anderson appeared to take a far‐from‐warm view of such working‐class practices by employing the grotesque cackling sound of a laughing policeman to suggest the drunken vulgarity of the visitors. Last Resort effectively shows this park 50 years later, in dilapidated form, largely lifeless and empty apart from a miserable room full of blinking, coin‐operated slot machines.



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The famous Dreamland wooden rollercoaster (known as the Scenic Railway, built in 1919/20) is a key architectural structure in Last Resort. This structure is pictured several times in the film, although it does not play a significant role in the narrative. As such, its pictorial presence suggests its importance to the development of a narrative space in the film. In its rickety form it might be read as representative of past freedoms and play, but also at the same time as representative of the potential thrills (and indeed ups and downs) of temporary journeys. As such, it provides an ironic spatial and indeed architectural counterpoint to Tanya’s own troubled journey, which begins after all on the high of an optimistic adventure (the trip from Russia to Britain), before entering a nightmarish dip through temporary incarceration in Stonehaven, and finally moving on to a possibly positive conclusion as she heads off towards London with Artiom at the end of the film. But when it is pictured, the sad, unloved, unused carnivalesque structure of the rollercoaster serves to reinforce the sense that the breathless joy that Tanya hoped to find in Britain is unattainable. The 1950s was the last ‘golden decade’ of English seaside resorts (Demetriadi 1997, p. 51). Margate suffered as a consequence of a surge in cheap foreign holidays in the late 1960s and 1970s (Monk 2012, p. 491; see also Fiske 1989, p. 76; Shaw and Williams 1997, pp. 9–10). But despite this, the town continued to be depicted on screen as a space of escape from comparatively dull, quotidian realities. For example, Black Joy (Anthony Simmons, 1977) has young British Afro‐Caribbeans drive down to the resort from south London in a Buick for some recreational activity. John Sullivan’s hugely popular British television comedy series Only Fools and Horses features a trip to Margate in the memorable 1989 episode, ‘The Jolly Boys’ Outing’. The pop duo Chas and Dave’s 1982 hit song ‘Margate’ features the lines ‘Well I’ve been working hard to reach me target/To earn a few bob for a day trip down to Margate’, and, tellingly, ‘You can keep the Costa Brava’, suggestive of a recent shift in working‐class holidaying activities towards foreign places. Later texts notice the faded charm of the town, but also sometimes gesture towards its concomitant socio‐cultural problems. Last Orders (Fred Schepisi, 2001) sets up the seaside town as the destination of middle‐aged, working‐class Londoners who want to scatter the ashes of an old mate (this film was an adaptation of the novel by Graham Swift). Tracy Emin’s film Top Spot (2000) features a number of shots – including an opening montage – that depict Margate as a complicated space of day trippers and alienated, adolescent, local, white working‐class English girls. And Gypo ( Jan Dunn, 2005), also shot in Margate, tells the story of a working‐ class girl who befriends a Romany Czech refugee. While Margate – and its historically carnivalesque activity – had declined by the time that Last Resort was shot there, traces of the bodily carnivalesque endure in debased forms in the film. For example, Last Resort depicts a seedy, undercover ­pornography industry. Les (played by real‐life porn filmmaker and actor Lindsey Honey aka Ben Dover) approaches Tanya in a fish and chip shop (a seaside haunt par excellence). She considers performing cybersex for him for much‐needed money

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in his ‘interactive masturbation factory’ (Sinclair 2001, p. 17). Although she ultimately recoils from this activity, it is effectively presented as a seemingly safe (but  also, of course, exploitative) extension and magnification of historically archetypal kiss‐me‐quick, carnivalesque seaside vulgarity. Furthermore, in a ­ noticeably Ballardian touch the film also has asylum seekers offering undercover blood donations for payment in the backstreets of the town.

Last Resort: The Semiotics of Brutalist Architecture One other key architectural space in Last Resort that melds a ghostly sense of a past, optimistic, utopian vision for Britain with a miserable contemporary dystopia is the looming grey, brutalist tower block (and its immediate environs) in which Tanya and Artiom are temporarily housed (Figure 20.2). Arlington House, which stands close to the promenade in Margate, is a building in many ways out of place and at odds with its surroundings. Designed by Russell Diplock and Associates, the tower is a striking example of the 1960s high‐rise project in Britain that initially symbolised the positive spirit of modernity. Brutalist architecture (of which this is a listed, prime example)  –  typically large buildings often used by socialist governments  –  initially communicated a sense of optimism and was effectively anti‐bourgeois and anti‐heritage. As shot in the film, this grey, jagged tower rises by the Victorian promenade like an obelisk or a monumental pagan stone. In her review of the film in Sight and Sound, (Lizzie) Francke argues that the

Figure 20.2  A ‘contemporary dystopia’: Last Resort (2000).



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cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski renders its ‘abstract shapes’ (Francke 2001, p. 53). Stella Hockenhull interestingly reads the tower as a ‘dark sentinel’ that recalls the Gothic tradition (2014, p. 176). But in Last Resort the tower suggests a complex and indeed conflicted range of meanings. Recognising how far its semiotic force has seemingly shifted away from the aims and ambitions that originally drove its design and construction in Margate, Andrew Burke insightfully argues that ‘the tower block turned detention camp that overlooks a decaying Dreamland powerfully compresses the failures of modern Britain into a single image’ (Burke 2007, p. 184). But Burke also points out: Since the tower block had once been one of the primary symbols of the future, to abandon them to decay and dilapidation is tantamount to the loss not only of that future, of a modernity defined by the benefits of technology and planning, of state investment and public infrastructure. (Burke 2007, p. 186)

Interestingly, for Merrill Schleier, tall buildings ‘may reflect and prescribe cultural meaning in a perpetual dialogue between diverse constituencies, including architects, politicians, and a viewing public, among others’ (Schleier 2009, p. viii).3 Last Resort certainly draws on such a complex historical dialogue between diverse constituents with regard to this specific tower, and, more broadly, a complex, shifting history of responses to the modernist/brutalist architectural project (and ­concomitant broader issues of social housing and planning) in Britain. To extend this reading further, the tower in Last Resort becomes a controlling presence or nexus in the film. It is certainly a dehumanising structure; a space that speaks of regulation and control; a space of planned, governed social life. Static shots filmed from a distance emphasise the incongruous and perhaps unwelcome nature of this building (just as its inhabitants in the film are clearly unwelcome). Other shots looking up at it from below convey a sense of awe at its size and inhuman scale (thus suggesting the power of the authorities to corral and control immigrants). Furthermore, shots from Tanya’s temporary accommodation in this tower looking down at the town (and, especially, at the Scenic Railway rollercoaster in Dreamland) convey the dehumanised nature of the lives of those who are trapped, and, again, suggest her view of her own personal journey. Ben Highmore points out that the view of a city from above has often ‘been associated with the planner’s perspective, privileging the demands of a generalized urbanism over the lives and needs of the city’s inhabitants’ (Highmore 2005, p. 3; see also De Certeau 1984). But here in Last Resort this view from a tall building more obviously represents Tanya’s alienation from the immediate place in which she finds herself. So in terms of how Arlington House is employed in Last Resort, we should remember again Andrew Higson’s work on the employment of landscapes in the films of the British New Wave, where he argues that a number of these films ­feature places that are ‘used up by the narrative at a metaphorical level’ to form a ‘geography of the mind’ (Higson 1996, p. 140). Whereas Arlington House was

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initially an example of a positive, modern architectural project, as we have seen, it operates in Last Resort as a metaphorical ‘counter‐utopia’; as a space from which one would instead wish to escape (Bardan 2008, p. 48). Yosefa Loshitzsky argues that ‘Tanya, the damsel in distress locked in the tower of detention, is eventually freed by Alfie, the gentle working‐class hero’ (Loshitzky 2006, p. 752). One might also argue that this architectural structure is a spatial articulation of a powerful, controlling masculinity; it is the phallic centre or lodestone of the film: a space in which we effectively witness migrant feminine subservience to the masculine. After all, Tanya’s life in this tower is initially governed by a promise from Mark, then by the predatory (if also kind‐hearted) Alfie, then by the offer from the pornographer, and to a certain extent, throughout, by the demands of her son, with whom she evidently has a quasi‐oedipal relationship. So the tower functions as a metaphor of Tanya’s captivity. That is, while Tanya is captive in a very real sense as an asylum seeker in Britain, she is also clearly captive to performances of masculine power. It is also significant that we see Tanya being photographed by the immigration authorities and later filmed by Les, a pornographer, as this further demonstrates that her status as an attractive young woman trapped within the confines of patriarchal power is key to the narrative and thus to the sense of space created by the film. This tower, and the almost empty Dreamland, are made to work together in the film to develop a discernible space of hybridity and contradiction: a space in which socio‐cultural and historical realities and ­cinematic fantasies collide against each other.

Conclusion Stonehaven operates as (and evokes) an imaginative borderland in the film: a highly complex, hybrid space in which a range of historically utopian visions for Britain exist as ghostly traces in a contemporary or near‐future dystopian nightmare. While Last Resort can in some ways be situated within the documentary and social‐realist traditions of British filmmaking – it was shot on location in a peripheral town, follows the lives of seemingly ‘real’ characters, and deals with the quotidian effects of contemporary socio‐cultural problems and issues – it also incorporates elements that clearly suggest that this is not a straightforward representation of contemporary socio‐cultural reality. Thus the sense of ‘authenticity’ offered by shots of real locations in the 1950s and 1960s British New Wave film cycle (and subsequent social‐realist films) is not in play in Last Resort in any simple way. Instead, like a range of contemporary British films such as Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1997), Orphans (Peter Mullan, 1998), Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007), and Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2008), the film merges a sense or realistic authenticity with elements of fantasy in order to explore and critique complex themes of contemporary national identity, gendered identity, institutional bureaucracy, and broader



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concepts of freedom and captivity in contemporary Britain. Central to this merging of authenticity and fantasy is the film’s construction of a complex, hybrid sense of spatiality which draws on a range of meanings suggested by place and, specifically, by the striking architectural specificities of Dreamland and Arlington House. Specifically, Last Resort develops a sense of space that draws on the obvious tensions that exist between past and present readings of carnivalesque and brutalist architecture in particular, and what these shifting interpretations might suggest about the construction of identity. In other words, while the British seaside town has traditionally been seen as a carnivalesque space of minor transgressions, temporary transformations, and utopian pleasures, in Last Resort it also becomes a space of constant surveillance, exploitation, and control.

Notes 1 The Victorian authorities ‘were concerned to shift pleasures from the sites of mass activity (fairs, football matches with unlimited players, carnivals verging on riot) to the site of private and individualized activity’ (Mercer 1983, p. 89; see also Malcolmson 1973, pp. 75–88; Rojek 1985, pp. 26–28; Webb 2005, p. 123). 2 Films that represent seaside towns as sites of the working‐class carnivalesque include The Good Companions (1932), Bank Holiday (1938), Sing As We Go (1934), versions of Hindle Wakes (1918, 1927, 1931, 1952), Three Kings (1929), No Lady (1931), Cotton Queen (1937), Holiday Camp (1947), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949), Forbidden (1949), Holidays with Pay (1949), Brighton Rock (1947), Carry On Girls (1973), That’ll Be the Day (1973), and Wish You Were Here (1989). 3 For more on the relationship between cinema and architecture, see Neumann (1996), Penz and Thomas (1997), Clarke (1997), and Shiel and Fitzmaurice (2001).

References Allen, Steven (2008). British cinema at the seaside: the limits of liminality. Journal of British Cinema and Television 5 (1): 53–70. Bakhtin, Mikhail M (1984). Rabelais and His World. (trans. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bardan, Alice (2008). Welcome to Dreamland: the realist impulse in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6 (1): 49–63. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2007). London in Film: The Cinematic City Since 1945. London: British Film Institute. Burke, Andrew (2007). Concrete universality: tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (3): 177–188. Cardwell, Sarah (2006). Working the land: representations of rural England in adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s novels. In: Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films About the Land (ed. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield), 19–34. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

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Chibnall, Steve and Petley, Julian (2007). Introduction. Journal of British Cinema and Television 4 (2): 213–218. Church Gibson, Pamela (2003). Imaginary landscapes, jumbled topographies: cinematic London. In: London: From Punk to Blair (ed. Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson), 363–369. London: Reaktion Books. Clarke, David (ed.) (1997). The Cinematic City. London: Routledge. Dave, Paul (2006). Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema. Oxford: Berg. De Certeau, Michel (1988) (orig. 1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. (trans. Steven Rendell). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fiske, John (1989). Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Fitzgerald, John (2010). Studying British Cinema 1999–2009. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Francke, Lizzie (2001). Last Resort. Sight and Sound 11 (3): 52–53. Harper, Sue (2010). The ownership of woods and water: landscapes in British cinema 1930–1960. In: Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation, and Cultural Geography (ed. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner), 147–160. Bristol: Intellect. Highmore, Ben (2005). Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Higson, Andrew (1996). Space, place, spectacle: landscape and townscape in the “kitchen sink” film. In: Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 133–156. London: Cassell. Higson, Andrew (2006). Re‐presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film. In: British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started, 2e (ed. Lester Friedman), 91–109. London: Wallflower. Hill, John (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963. London: British Film Institute. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hockenhull, Stella (2014). Aesthetics and Neo‐Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Konstantarakos, Myrto (2000). Introduction. In: Spaces in European Cinema (ed. Myrto Konstantarakos), 1–7. Exeter: Intellect. Lefebvre, Martin (2006). Between setting and landscape in the cinema. In: Landscape and Film (ed. Martin Lefebvre), 19–59. New York: Routledge. Low, Rachael (1949). The History of the British Film, 1906–1914. London: George Allen and Unwin. Malcolmson, R (1973). Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazierska, Ewa and Rascaroli, Laura (2003). From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Mercer, C (1983). A poverty of desire: pleasure and popular politics. In: Formations of Pleasure (ed. Formations Editorial Collective), 84–100. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Monk, Claire (2012). “If you can’t make a good political film, don’t”: Pawel Pawlikowski’s resistant poetic realism. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 480–501. Murphy, Robert (2009). Citylife: urban fairy‐tales in late 90s British cinema. In: British Cinema Book, 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 357–365. London: British Film Institute.



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Neumann, Dietrich (1996). Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner. Munich: Preston Verlag. Newland, Paul (2008). The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Iconography, Modernity, and the Spatialisation of Englishness. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nowell‐Smith, Geoffrey (2000). How films mean, or, from aesthetics to semiotics and half way back again. In: Reinventing Film Studies (ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams), 8–17. London: Arnold. Orr, John (2002). Traducing realisms: Naked and Nil by Mouth. Journal of Popular British Cinema 5: 104–113. Penz, François and Thomas, Maureen (eds.) (1997). Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet‐ Stevens, Multimedia. London: British Film Institute. Roberts, Les (2002). Welcome to Dreamland: from place to non‐place and back again in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort. New Cinemas 1 (2): 78–90. Rojek, Chris (1985). Capitalism and Leisure Theory. London: Tavistock. Schleier, Merrill (2009). Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shaw, Gareth and Williams, Allan (1997). Riding the big dipper: the rise and decline of the British seaside resort in the twentieth century. In: The Rise and Fall of British Coastal Resorts: Cultural and Economic Perspectives (ed. Gareth Shaw and Allan Williams), 1–18. London: Mansell. Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice, Tony (eds.) (2001). Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Shields, Rob (1991). Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Sinclair, Iain (2001). The cruel seaside. Sight and Sound 11 (3): 16–18. Walton, John K (2000). The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Webb, Darren (2005). Bakhtin at the seaside: utopia, modernity and the carnivalesque. Theory, Culture & Society 22 (3): 121–138.

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Gender, Sexuality, and Irish Film Debbie Ging

Introduction This chapter attempts to summarise and critically evaluate the study of gender and sexuality in Irish cinema, with a view to identifying the main thematic concerns and approaches – as well as the gaps – that have characterised this field of scholarship to date. I consider a number of factors which have uniquely shaped the treatment of gender and sexuality, both in Irish film and in Irish film studies: the lack of an indigenous film industry until the late 1970s, the dominance until the 1970s of British and American constructions of gender, the long representational history of gendering the nation, which has also characterised much academic writing, the influence of the Catholic Church on sexuality and reproductive rights, and the impact of the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise. As this overview will demonstrate, while considerable attention has been paid to women and the family, and a small but growing body of work had addressed men and masculinity, sex and sexuality remain somewhat underrepresented themes, both in Irish cinema itself and in the Irish film studies literature.

The Early Years In Ireland, there has traditionally been a tightly woven relationship between gender and nation, consolidated both by colonial constructions of Hibernia (Curtis 1971) and by the efforts of nationalists to reconstruct a set of images and narratives

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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that would serve as an antidote, post‐independence, to the emasculating discourses of occupation. As Ashis Nandy (1983) and Nira Yuval‐Davis (1997) have demonstrated, remasculinising the nation is a key driver in the reconstruction of collective postcolonial identities, and Ireland was no exception in this regard. Cinema, ­however, did not play a central role in this process, which was taken up more readily by indigenous sport, education, religion, the Irish language, storytelling, and traditional music and dance. There are several reasons for this. Ireland was a politically fractured place in the early years of the twentieth century, and filmmaking was not considered a priority in terms of how its creative and financial energies should be channelled. The arrival of sound increased production costs further and, in the absence of state support, it was impossible for a healthy film industry to develop. In addition to this, Ireland’s Catholic authorities were suspicious of cinema’s moral influences and, as film historian Kevin Rockett (2004) has documented, films were scrutinised, cut, and banned with impunity.1 Finally, film‐going in Ireland was considered a working‐class pursuit (Pettitt 2000), and was viewed as debased or low culture in contrast with the more patriotic pursuits of theatre, traditional dance, or indigenous sports. Cinema, therefore, failed to capture the imagination of the Free State’s political and cultural architects, and reluctance on the part of investors and resistance from Cabinet ministers meant that a film studio was not actually established until the mid‐1950s. As a result, the early years of cinema in Ireland were characterised by foreign productions made in and about Ireland, a trend that persisted right up until the formation of the first Irish Film Board in 1980. As Rockett (1996, p. i) points out, ‘More fiction films were produced about the Irish by American film‐makers before 1915, when the first indigenous Irish fiction film was made, than in the whole ­hundred year history of fiction film‐making in Ireland.’ Despite this, there was a moderately vibrant period of indigenous filmmaking during the silent era and, taken together, these films demonstrate some interesting continuities in terms of their construction of discourses around Irish masculinity and femininity. Indeed, it is arguably only during this period that Irish cinema could be said to have engaged with a dominant, State‐endorsed vision of gender (relations), and of Irish national identity. Thus, although an indigenous film industry was slow to develop, and cinema did not play a key role in the construction of national identity, even the inconsistent filmic output of the first half of the twentieth century offers useful insights into emergent constructions of Irish gender. With the exception of Ging (2013), very little has been written about this period of Irish cinema from the perspective of gender. What emerges from my analysis of the early films is the recurrence of certain tropes around manhood, which attempt to (re)construct Irish masculinity as virile and self‐determining as well as spiritual, family‐oriented, and connected to the land. These heroic male figures are frequently contrasted with a British rival, who is wealthy but also narcissistic, morally corrupt, and distinctly urban. The symbolic connection of Irish masculinity to the land, therefore, not only serves to mark the Irishman out in

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opposition to British manhood (constructed as effete and materialistic) but also ensures his marriageability, thus signalling the possibility of self‐sustenance and procreation, both at the level of family and nation. Indeed, this narrative trope sets the early Irish films apart from those made by non‐indigenous filmmakers such as the prolific Canadian director Sydney Olcott. In contrast to the non‐­ indigenous portrayals of Irish manhood, which tend to culminate in the hero’s exile to America, the Irish‐produced films show the hero inheriting wealth or land – often through unexpected good fortune – or recouping his honour, thus enabling him to remain in Ireland. Given the fragmentation of farms and the constant threat of eviction suffered by peasant farmers, it is unsurprising that ownership or dispossession of land played such a key role in films such as O’Neil of the Glen (1916), When Love Came to Gavin Burke (1917), Knocknagow (1918), Paying the Rent (1919), Rosaleen Dhu (1919), The Casey Millions (1922), and Cruiskeen Lawn (1922). These films were effectively meditations on the plight of the Irish male, since the protagonist almost always found himself in a position of extreme disadvantage: competing with British ­aristocrats for the affections of his ‘sweetheart’, evicted from his home, framed for a crime he did not commit or on the run from the British army, and oftentimes all of the above. With astonishing frequency, either tremendous good luck intervened to save the hero from his humiliated and emasculated status or his beloved decided to marry for love rather than money, thus recouping his social reputation as well as affording him the moral high ground over his aristocratic  –  and often explicitly feminised – rival (Ging 2013). In the handful of indigenously produced feature films that subsequently emerged – Knocknagow (1918), Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn – A Story of the Penal Days (1920), Irish Destiny (1926), and The Dawn (1936) – the protagonists were hard‐working, nationalist, family‐oriented, community‐focused, and morally pure. As such, they represented a move away from the feminine attributes of Celticism towards the strong, silent masculinity of Gaelicism. The female characters were similarly moral, marrying for love rather than money, and represented home, family, and thus the possibility of a stable (patriarchal) future for Ireland. New Gaelic Man was defined as the antithesis of his British counterparts, who were variously characterised as corrupt, disrespectful of women, immoral, brutally violent, pompous, and disconnected from the land. Thus, while Irish cinema was by no means the ‘mobilizer of the nation’s myths’ (Hayward 1993, p. 9) that it was in America and other European countries, taken together, these films indicate that some indigenous filmmakers were to project a coherent set of state‐endorsed ideals about gender roles and family in a free Ireland. While this period was short‐ lived, and despite rural depopulation and Ireland’s transition from an agrarian to a First‐World, post‐industrial economy, not to mention the seismic shifts that have occurred in gender relations over the past century, the New Gaelic Man imagery of the early twentieth century still prevails in many aspects of Irish culture today. Just as these low‐key heroes were assumed to symbolise the antithesis of British



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masculinity and the pomposity of Empire, the Gaelic Athletic Association and its sponsors would have us believe that contemporary Irish manhood stands for ­everything that British metrosexuality is not (Cronin 2007).

Women According to Fidelma Farley (1999, p. 220): Cinematic representations of Irish women have been limited to certain roles and functions. The passive, suffering mother, the romantic heroine, and the violent femme fatale recur in Irish cinema from its earliest inception, and continue in varying guises in contemporary cinema.

As Ruth Barton (2004, p. 113) points out, symbolic or allegorical configurations of the nation as female have a long representational history in Ireland, and have been the subject of much academic writing: Too often, women and men in Irish films seem burdened by symbolism and lack any organic relationship to the lived experience of their real life prototypes in and outside of Ireland, historically and in the present. (Barton 2004, p. 114)

Such ‘allegorically freighted’ (Haslam 1999, p. 5) configurations have engendered a highly masculinist concept of the social order, in which men function as agents and women are idealised as symbols or figureheads. It is unsurprising, therefore, that such idealised constructions of femininity and motherhood found their way both into early indigenous films such as Knocknagow (1918) and Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920) and into the kind of soft primitivist fantasies that underpinned Sidney Olcott’s silent films and later John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). Indeed, the Irish mother, asexual, self‐sacrificing, and safekeeper of patriarchy, and maternal fantasies generally persisted, albeit in more self‐referential ways, in much later films such as My Left Foot (1998), The Butcher Boy (1997), The Boy from Mercury (1996), and Some Mother’s Son (1996), and as a structuring absence in Philadelphia, Here I Come (1975), Korea (1995), Moondance (1995), Into the West (1992), Lamb (1985), and The Field (1990). When the first Irish Film Board was established in 1981, independent filmmakers were finally given an opportunity to critique these myths of family, nation, and gender. Although only 18 feature films were produced in the 1980s, they constitute what Martin McLoone (2000, p. 131) has described as ‘an impressively adventurous group of films that augured well for a critically engaged indigenous cinema’. Influenced by avant‐garde filmmaking styles from elsewhere in Europe and by the radical political movements of the 1970s, directors such as Thaddeus

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O’Sullivan, Pat Murphy, Kieran Hickey, Cathal Black, Bob Quinn, and Gerry Stembridge set about dismantling the shibboleths both of Irish culture and of a patchy film tradition mired in caricature and stereotype. Their work, while often somewhat inaccessible to mainstream audiences, attracted much attention from Irish studies scholars and media theorists. Among the first to recognise the potential of these films as prototypes for an Irish feminist cinema were Barbara O’Connor (1984) and Luke Gibbons (1983). While Gibbons’ analysis focuses on Pat Murphy’s feminist film Maeve (1981), O’Connor’s article in the journal The Crane Bag was the first attempt to address the question of women’s representation in Irish cinema more generally. For Gibbons (1983, p. 148), Maeve was a landmark film not only because it was the first feminist film made in Ireland but also because ‘it confronts the whole romantic tradition’ upon which cinematic representations of Ireland had been based up until that point. A complex meditation on the tensions between feminism and nationalism, Gibbons demonstrated how Maeve takes issue with the romantic ideologies of Irish Republicanism and its marginalisation of women’s accounts of  history, as well as with ‘the manner in which both landscape and narrative bear the imprint of a male controlling vision’ (1983, p. 151) in cinematic accounts of Ireland’s past and in classical realist artforms more generally. Excluding Maeve from her analysis on the basis that it was an explicitly feminist film, O’Connor departed from dominant feminist thinking of the day in three key ways: first, by arguing that a realist aesthetic in film practice was not necessarily patriarchal; second, by demonstrating that a feminist or gender‐progressive cinema did not have to be directed by women; and, third, by taking issue with calls from within the mainstream media, as exemplified in the RTE: The Report on Women in Broadcasting at the time, for the replacement of negative stereotypes of women as housewife and mother with more positive portrayals. She argued that positive ­representations of women were in no way a guarantee of a feminist sensibility and indeed might even prevent the kind of critical examination of real Irish lives that was so lacking in idealised representations. She used male‐directed films such as Kieran Hickey’s Exposure (1978) and Criminal Conversation (1980), Wynne‐ Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), and Tommy McArdle’s The Kinkisha (1977) to demonstrate their ability to foreground women’s perspectives and experiences and to challenge and subvert patriarchal norms. Although O’Connor excluded from her analysis other independent films such as Cathal Black’s Our Boys (1981) and Wheels (1976) and Bob Quinn’s Poitin (1978) and Caoineadh Art Ui Laoire (1975) on the grounds that they did not address or feature women, later work on masculinity (Ging 2013) demonstrates that some of these films were also gender‐progressive, in spite of their lack of female characters, when viewed as critiques of hegemonic masculinity and of the state’s patriarchal institutions. Given the centrality of the idealised maternal figure to a repressive and reactionary nationalism, it is unsurprising that so many of the First Wave filmmakers and those that they subsequently inspired set about deconstructing myths of



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motherhood. Significantly, many of these films emerged in the wake of the Abortion Referendum of 1983 and the Ann Lovett and Kerry babies stories,2 in which teen pregnancies ended in tragedy and caused prolonged national debates about women’s reproductive rights. Thus, in films such as Waterbag (1984), Reefer and the Model (1988), Hush‐a‐Bye‐Baby (1989), December Bride (1990), The Truth About Claire (1991), The Miracle (1991), and The Playboys (1992), the sacred maternal was variously demystified, dismissed, or politicised in ways that challenged not only dominant representational traditions in Irish culture but also the conservative Catholic political class of the day. According to Gibbons (1993), these films allowed for the expression of women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which had hitherto been repressed and denied unless framed within the context of an i­ dealised motherhood. Considering that women were prohibited from publicly discussing their own experiences of abortion in the media in the run up to the Abortion Referendum, with all‐male panels of clerics and medics speaking for them, Gibbons (1993, p. 13) contends that ‘the maternal narratives of Irish film operated as the “return of the repressed”’ and as ‘alternative national narratives to the official ­discourses of faith and fatherland’. Since O’Connor and Gibbons first addressed the question of women and feminism in Irish cinema, there has been broad consensus among Irish film scholars (McLoone 2000; Pettitt 2000; Ging 2002; Barton 2004) that the First Wave films had in common ‘a relentlessly counter‐hegemonic drive’ (Barton 2004, p. 102), which necessarily involved the subversion of dominant constructions of gender and ­sexuality, embedded as these were both in state‐endorsed visions of the nation and in outsiders’ romantic and nostalgic constructions of Irishness. As we will see, however, O’Connor’s concluding question ‘as to the direction which a feminist film project should take; what kind of films should be made, who should produce them and for whom?’ remains unanswered some 30 years later. Notwithstanding some impressive and overtly feminist interventions, most notably Pat Murphy’s later films Anne Devlin (1984) (Figure 21.1) and Nora (2000), Margo Harkin’s Hush a Bye Baby (1990) and a number of shorts made by Orla Walsh, a sustained or clearly definable body of feminist filmmaking failed to emerge in Ireland in the same way as it has in the UK, for example, in the work of Sally Potter, Antonia Bird, Carine Adler, Andrea Arnold, and Lynne Ramsay.

Cosmopolitanism, Postfeminism, and the Second Irish Film Board In 1987, the first Irish Film Board was wound up by the government on the grounds of insufficient financial returns, and filmmakers had to look to the UK for financial support. The successes of Neil Jordan’s films, My Left Foot (1989) and The Crying Game (1992), both British productions, ultimately convinced the government of

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Figure 21.1  Female resistance: Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin (1984).

the viability of a national film industry, and the Irish Film Board was re‐established in 1993. In the same year, homosexuality was decriminalised, Ireland began to move into a period of economic prosperity, and the Section 35 tax incentive for film investment (latterly known as Section 481) was comprehensively overhauled (Barton 2004). During this period, the Irish Film Board actively pursued a policy of constructing ‘a practice of filmmaking that came from, and spoke to, its own national imaginary with authenticity and integrity, whilst also navigating the implications of international finance from a market dominated by doxa from elsewhere’ (Stoneman 2005, p. 251). Filmmakers were encouraged to think of themselves as ‘market‐responsive auteurs’ (Stoneman 2005, p. 252), who considered their audience at every stage of the production process. The implementation of this policy coincided with a conscious desire on the part of many Irish filmmakers to abandon national themes and stories in favour of more universal ones (McLoone 2000; Ging 2002; Barton 2004), with the result that Irish cinema looked increasingly to successful formulae from elsewhere. While some argued that the move towards more universal, commercially viable models of filmmaking would inevitably reinforce rather than challenge conservative tropes and stereotypes (Rockett 1999; McLoone 2000) and the marginalisation of difference (Ging 2002), Barton (2004, p. 110) has argued that the Celtic Tiger economy ‘also allowed filmmakers to escape from the old obsessions, notably of nationalism and the State’. Indeed, as Barton suggests, the shift away from a preoccupation with nationalism to a greater concern with individualism and the self



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was expressed predominantly through gender representations. Thus, even though many of the films that followed (the second Irish Film Board supported approximately 100 feature films) exhibited what Barton (2004, p. 112) refers to as ‘the culturally specific desire not to be culturally specific’ and were less politically radical than their predecessors, they were at least engagements with or interventions into a wider set of ‘gender scripts’ (Nixon 1997) at work in western culture generally – from Lad Culture and metrosexuality to postfeminism3 – and as such succeeded in breaking with the ‘allegorically freighted’ tradition that had hitherto characterised Irish filmmaking and Irish film scholarship. While this break with tradition marked the increased visibility of lesbian/gay/ bisexual/transgender (LGBT) characters and the emergence of more diverse images of and discourses on masculinity in Irish cinema, it also coincided with a broader cultural shift towards postfeminism and the emergence of Lad Culture. These developments have not augured well for the possibility of radical female voices in Irish film. Coupled with the dominance of male directors and the gender dynamics of market research, whereby ‘The cycle of created demand is locked into specific audience targeting, often focussed on a teenage male demographic’ (Stoneman 2005, p. 259), they have resulted in the side‐lining of female characters and narratives or their confinement to romantic dramas. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has been little academic work in the last 10 years that focuses exclusively on women in Irish cinema.

Men and Masculinity There has been a limited body of scholarly work on men and masculinity in Irish cinema, most likely due to a certain disconnect between the frameworks that dominate most American studies of masculinity in cinema, namely, the tendency to concentrate on images of the heroic, dominant, or hegemonic masculinity (Smith 1996, p. 88), and the realities of Irish cinematic representation, namely, a distinct lack of heroic male figures. Indeed, as I have noted in my own analysis (Ging 2013, p. 1), Irish cinema has been strikingly deficient in heroic men: Cinematic visions of Gaelic musclemen and swashbucklers do not readily spring to mind. We are more accustomed to images of men who are violent, tyrannical, ­emotionally damaged, depressed, suicidal, alcoholic, socially marginalised, or otherwise excluded from the dividends of male cinematic heroism.

Kerstin Ketteman’s, Maria Pramaggiore’s, and Margot Gayle Backus’ contributions to James McKillop’s (1999) collection on contemporary Irish cinema address questions of masculinity in relation to individual films (Backus 1999; Ketteman 1999; Pramaggiore 1999), while Fidelma Farley’s (2001) work looks specifically at

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the trope of fatherhood in contemporary Northern Irish films. Joseph Moser’s (2013) book Irish Masculinity on Screen addresses the work of three directors ( John Ford, Jim Sheridan, and Paul Greengrass), only one of whom is Irish, and is thus primarily concerned with American‐Irish and British understandings and appropriations of Irish masculinity on screen. In his analysis of Sheridan’s work, Moser (Moser 2013) identifies the rejection of hard, violent masculinity and the embracing of a peaceful, progressive masculinity, thus resolving the conflict between violence and politics, on the one hand, and family and fatherhood on the other that Hill (1988) indicates is evident in an earlier tradition of ‘Troubles’ films. Similarly, for Fidelma Farley (2001, p. 203), ‘The Peace Process appears to have created a space for the articulation of a masculine identity and agency which is underpinned by the ethos of non‐violence, and this is figured principally through a commitment to family and fatherhood.’ Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of The Father is the most important film in this meta‐narrative but Farley also includes The Boxer (1997) and Nothing Personal (1995) in her analysis. My book, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (Ging 2013) attempts a more comprehensive – partly chronological, partly thematic – overview of representations of and discourses on men and masculinity in Irish film from the silent period to the present. I argue that Irish films collectively present us with a uniquely nuanced and comprehensive overview of the impact that important economic, (gender‐)political, and cultural shifts in Ireland and beyond have had on ­representations of and discourses around men and masculinities in this country. Notwithstanding the problems inherent in such a male‐dominated industry, I  argue that it is crucial to distinguish between a self‐reflexively male point of view, on the one hand, and a perspective that is patriarchal or masculinist – in other words which understands traditional masculinity as somehow neutral, objective, or invisible – on the other. It is my contention that a significant majority of Irish films, rather than normalising traditional Irish manhood, have rendered it both visible and problematic and that Irish cinema has collectively produced some of the most astutely observed and gender‐progressive accounts of Irish men and masculinity available outside of academic research. Irish filmmakers’ precociousness in identifying and exploring the psychological dynamics and side‐effects of patriarchy is all the more impressive when we consider that men’s studies was only beginning to emerge as an academic discipline in Great Britain and the United States when films such as Kieran Hickey’s Exposure (1978) and Cathal Black’s Our Boys4 (1981) were made. These ‘First‐Wave’ films appeared long before the notion of masculinity‐in‐crisis became commonplace in popular media debates and almost 20 years before clerical child abuse entered mainstream public discourse in Ireland. The subsequent move away from historical, rural, and national narratives towards more contemporary, urban, and universal ones has been theorised primarily within the parameters of national culture and identity (McLoone 2000; Ging 2002; Barton 2004). My work considers



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these new images and discourses of manhood in relation to Lad Culture, the rise of the metrosexual, and the kinds of British and American male‐oriented (sub) genres that emerged in response to the notion of masculinity in crisis, such as the new British gangster cycle (Chibnall 2001), the male underclass film (Monk 1999), the American ‘smart film’ (Sconce 2002), the ‘male rampage film’ (Pfeil 1995), and the teen or ‘gross‐out’ comedy (Greven 2002). Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema is therefore an attempt to link the study of masculinity in Irish cinema with theoretical writings on men relating to other national cinemas as well as to masculinity studies more generally. Paternal masculinity is explored, tracing a trajectory from dysfunctional father‐son relationships – The Boy from Mercury (1996), The Butcher Boy (1997), Angela’s Ashes (1999), Korea (1995), 2 × 4 (1998), The Leavetaking (1982), The Miracle (1991), Country (2000), Horse (1993), On the Edge (2001), Small Engine Repair (2006), and Kisses (2008) – to a new generation of men as they embark on the perilous journey of becoming fathers themselves – Ondine (2009), Adam and Paul (2004), The Looking Glass (2010), Seaside Stories (2010), Occi versus the World (2009), and Eamon (2009). I also address the concept of masculinity in crisis through the prism of speaking and silence, arguing that both catatonic and hyper‐loquacious tendencies in male characters, particularly in The Guard (2011), In Bruges (1997), and Intermission (2003), betray anxieties about the expression of male emotion in a changing society. Given the assumed centrality of the Northern Ireland question to issues of Irish identity, as well as the longevity of the Troubles (from the late 1960s until the Anglo‐Irish Agreement in 1996 and beyond), it is unsurprising that numerous Irish (and non‐Irish) filmmakers have addressed this theme. It has been suggested (Hill 1988) that many of the negative stereotypes about Irish masculinity perpetuated by US and British filmmakers have been internalised and reappropriated in Irish films such as Cal (1984) and Angel (1982). According to McLoone (2000), this concept of Irish sectarian violence as innate and atavistic has remained visible in a large number of filmic representations of the Troubles, among them Cal, Angel, and, I would add, Anton (2007). After the ceasefire, however, as Hill (2006) has also pointed out, portrayals of ‘the dark Celtic soul’ began to give way to a more nuanced questioning of the legitimacy of violence and, in many cases, explicitly challenged nationalism’s patriarchal underpinnings. According to Farley (2001, p. 211), films emerging around the time of the peace process offered new models of masculinity based on the rejection of violence and an embracing of family values, driven primarily through reformed father‐son relationships. However, as both Moser (2004) and Farley (2001) have pointed out, the reformed father, although he is now ‘fighting within the rules’, continues to occupy the position of patriarch and does little to change the role of women or the fabric of gender relations generally. Lehner (2011) makes a similar point when she claims that the filiative reconciliation at the heart of these narratives domesticates and privatises the peace process rather than interrogating the politics of class or

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gender within the family. Speaking of Five Minutes of Heaven as well as David Park’s novel, The Truth Commissioner, she concludes: [I]f both works address a sincere need for alternative visions of masculinity, they do not imagine truly new forms of gender relations, indicated by the fact that women are pressed into the margins, confined to the roles of wife and mother, with no real access to the public sphere. (Lehner 2011, p. 74)

Since the peace process began, there has also been an interesting shift away from Oedipal dramas and crime‐thrillers towards (romantic) comedy in films such as The Most Fertile Man in Ireland (2000), Wild About Harry (2000), Divorcing Jack (1998), and An Everlasting Piece (2000). Although the political conflict provides the backdrop and dramatic/comedic impetus for these films, their New Man protagonists have no connections with the Troubles and, in some cases, no memory of them. According to Hill (2006), the romantic comedy’s location in the realm of the private and the individual enables it to eschew politics, thus facilitating narratives of social transformation. In his cogent analysis of Mad about Mambo (1999), The Most Fertile Man in Ireland (1999), and With or Without You (1998), he argues that tropes of emasculation, infertility, and gender fluidity work to subvert stereotypical images of Northern Irish masculinity, albeit within the unrealistically optimistic coventions of the genre, which allows its protagonists to transcend social and political barriers (Figure 21.2). Similarly, I have argued that, in these comedies,

Figure 21.2  ‘Masculinity in crisis’: The Most Fertile Man in Ireland (1999).



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becoming a good or modern man requires a disavowal or forgetting of the northern Irish political situation (Ging 2013). They use, in this regard, the masculinity‐in‐crisis trope not as a means to decry society’s changing expectations of men but rather as a form of personal catharsis which not only enables the protagonist to become a good man but also to break with the political past and to become an individual. Viewed in the (post)modern context of celebrity chefs, strip‐o‐ grams, fertility clinics, and marital problems, those still caught up in the political conflict appear as comically dangerous throwbacks to a more sinister era. In the context of Northern Irish masculinity, comedy thus presents itself as the most obvious – and perhaps the only – space in which male characters can find a space outside of the historically and politically charged spaces of community and collectivism. However, given comedy’s limited capacity to address socio‐political issues, it is arguable that the most compelling critiques of nationalist masculinity have come from films with female protagonists, such as Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981), Stephen Burke’s After ‘68 (1993), Orla Walsh’s The Visit (1992), Margo Harkin’s Hush a Bye Baby (1990), and Tom Collins’ Bogwoman (1997) (Ging 2013). In the early noughties, Irish cinema exhibited an intense preoccupation with criminal, underclass masculinity in films such as Crush Proof (1999), Ordinary Decent Criminal (1999), Flick (2000), Saltwater (2000), Accelerator (2001), Last Days in Dublin (2001), Intermission (2003), The Halo Effect (2004), and Man About Dog (2004).5 This cycle continued with In Bruges (2008), Savage (2009), and Perrier’s Bounty (2009), and arguably paved the way for the highly successful television series Love/Hate. Displaying remarkable stylistic continuities with British films such as Snatch (2000) and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), these films appear to be less concerned with male social exclusion than they are with celebrating hard masculinity and homosocial pursuits. According to Chibnall (2001, pp. 282–283) in ­relation to the British films, ‘It does not take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the gangster cycle might index wider gender anxieties and to relate these anxieties to both changing occupational structures and social expectations and to the demonstrable gains of feminism.’ Meanwhile Monk (2000, p. 161) contends that images of underclass male youth have been mobilised by popular culture ‘as an emblem for a wider range of male insecurities and fears in need of reassurance’, thus attempting to reassert the hegemony of traditional masculinity and the re‐empowerment of men who feel genuinely dispossessed and marginalised as well as those whose ­anxieties may have nothing to do with poverty, drugs, or unemployment. More recently, a number of Irish films have begun to explore socially marginalised men not as signifiers of rebellion but as emotionally complex outsiders who fail to live up to the demands of hegemonic masculnity. As such, they belong to a new moment or mood in Irish cinema (Adam and Paul (2004), Garage (2007), Parked (2010), Out of Here (2013), Frank (2014)) characterised by a ‘natural world which shimmers through the destitution, and moments of intensity between humans and their environments that emphasise the phenomenological charge of being’ (Walsh 2012, p. 207). These studies of masculinity represent a significant shift in

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Irish cinema’s representational politics of gender and suggest, despite evidence of certain regressive forces at work, the future may open up greater possibilities for ‘non‐normative imaginings’ (Walsh 2012).

Sex and Sexuality Until the 1990s, Irish audiences were relatively under‐exposed to non‐normative images of Irish sexuality on the screen. In the years following the decriminalisation of homosexuality, a number of short films emerged, among them Eve Morrisson’s Summertime (1995), Barry Dignam’s Dream Kitchen (1999), and Orla Walsh’s Bent Out of Shape (1995), as well as two feature‐length films, Johnny Gogan’s The Last Bus Home (1997) and Jimmy Smallhorne’s 2 × 4 (1998).6 More concerned with rights and affirmation than with positive representations of homosexuality per se, these stories captured a moment in Ireland’s gay political history, in which young men dared to challenge the ‘straightgeist’ (Pettitt 1999) and, in most cases, survived to tell the tale. However, in her analysis of queer representations in Irish cinema, Jenny Murphy (2003) is critical of Irish cinema’s re‐appropriation of the tragic homosexual figure, arguing that these narratives have served to characterise gay people as lonely, conflicted, and victimised. Similarly, Ruth Barton (2004) has argued that homosexuality as trauma marks the discourse of many Irish films on this topic. For Murphy (2003), the search for the alternative articulation of gay concerns runs the risk of reducing homosexuality once again to the label of ‘other’, and she concludes that gay men and women must be portrayed as ‘multifaceted members of an evolving Irish society’, pointing towards a model of change and questioning from within the mainstream. More recently, Fintan Walsh (2012, p. 204) has argued that the preoccupation with national identity has resulted in both a de‐personalised and desexualised treatment of homosexuality, in which close treatment of personal identity politics is often sacrificed in favour of symbolic narratives: … sexuality has often been deployed in Irish film, and indeed many films about Ireland, to comment upon Mother Ireland and Father State, in a manner that stifles the erotic, and forecloses its thematic and stylistic potential. Within a largely narrativising film culture, sexuality has usually figured as an instrument of national reflection, rather than as a complex web of identifications, desires and affects, which I understand the term more accurately to index.

For Walsh, this resulted in a reluctance to represent a range of marginal subjectivities and practices concerning Irish sexualities as well as in a limited visual aesthetic. Similarly, Ed Madden (2011) has remarked that Irish films about homosexuality are rarely about homosexuality.



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Although, as Fintan Walsh (2008, p. 19) argues, the ‘traumatic figuration of homosexuality’ continued into the noughties in historical feature films such as The Magdelene Sisters (2002) and Song for a Raggy Boy (2003),7 the dominant mood in both film and television has moved towards a more upbeat and optimistic, as well as apolitical, approach to gay and bisexual characters and indeed towards modern Ireland generally. In the early 2000s, two films marked a significant shift in the representation of Irish male sexuality, namely Liz Gill’s Goldfish Memory (2002) and David Gleeson’s Cowboys and Angels (2003). These films present some recognisable aspects of the ‘New Ireland’, in which increased affluence and the decline of religion have created a new sexual landscape, seemingly uninhibited by prejudice, social conformism, or the economic imperative to marry. This more celebratory approach to gay narratives, featuring happy, well‐adjusted characters, was undoubtedly a welcome respite from the lonely, conflicted, and victimised characters that had been common up to that point (Murphy 2003). However, as I have argued elsewhere (Ging 2008), these films also represented something of a leap into an apolitical, socially uncontextualised world in which characters’ sexual choices appeared to be free of external prejudice or taboo of any kind. In this sense, they were arguably more utopian fantasy than a reflection of the rate of social change in Ireland, where homophobia was  –  and ­continues to be – a significant problem (Lynch and Lodge 2002; Norman and Galvin 2006), marriage equality had not yet been achieved and homosexuality remained absent from secondary‐school modules such as SPHE (Social, Personal and Health Education). In addition to being seen as merely optimistic, however, the rhetoric of sexual freedom and choice must also be considered in the context of its servicing of postfeminist and neoliberal economic agendas, whose convincing rhetoric of progress suggests that all is well in the world and collective political intervention is obsolete. According to Tasker and Negra (2007, p. 108), the inclusion of marginalised identities in postfeminist media culture is not coincidental: Postfeminism already incorporates a negotiation with hegemonic forces in simultaneously assuming the achievement and desirability of gender equality on the one hand while repeatedly associating such equality with loss on the other. That such fictions tend to exclude even as they include, propagating an environment for ethnically and racially diverse protagonists that is devoid of social or political context – at least explicitly – is also no surprise.

This tendency to position positive visions of non‐normative sexuality within what is ultimately a heteronormative framework results in a peculiarly individualistic, apolitical take on sexual diversity. There is arguably little in Goldfish Memory which genuinely challenges received views of existing gender structures or relations: everyone wants to get married and have babies and there is no sense of when or how these rights were fought for and won.

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Similarly Cowboys and Angels relies on the trope of television makeover programmes such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and How Gay Are You?, which considers gay culture from the perspective of how much it has to offer to straight men and heterosexuality. While this ostensibly fluid take on gender and sexuality has the potential to challenge traditional masculinity, it falls short of a genuine ‘queering’ of gendered identities. Homosexuality is depoliticised, desexualised, and rendered synonymous with camp. In this new consumerist guise, it is made available to all, not as a means of destabilising heteronormative masculinity but as a way of reforming it to comply with a more liberal consensus (Hanke 1998, p. 189). While such films presumably succeed in challenging some prejudices, ‘makeover homosexuality’ presents a safe and upbeat take on gender equality and sexual diversity, which arguably has little to do with the realities of daily life for most LGBT people in Ireland. Fintan Walsh describes the gay and bisexual characters in Goldfish Memory and Cowboys and Angels as ‘pseudo‐prophets of both sexual freedom and urban excitement’ who function primarily as symbols of Irish cosmopolitanism rather than explorations of gay sexuality. According to Walsh (2008), recent Irish cinema’s exploitation of ‘the figure of the homosexual as a sparkly emblem of neoliberalism’ reflects a deep desire to forget the past and ignore the injustices and inequities of the present, resulting in a queer subject ‘oddly evacuated of agency in the present, torn between his/her function as a symbol of national dystopia and utopia’. Whether it functions to allegorise traumas past or a brash, new modernity, therefore, it would appear that homosexuality has not escaped the burden of national symbolism in Irish cinema. As I have suggested elsewhere (Ging 2008), this problem might be better addressed if filmmakers were less concerned with positive or utopian representations and attended instead to the possibility that the ways in which sexual formations emerge and interconnect in different places are unique, and that the ‘international audience’ may in fact be interested in such culturally‐ specific explorations of life, as has been demonstrated by the successes of the Beur and banlieu films in France (Tarr 2004) and of recent Iranian and Turkish cinema. However, arguably the most significant development in thinking about gender and sexuality in Irish cinema in recent years lies in Fintan Walsh’s location of queerness in films that are not overtly concerned with LGBT identity. Not only do such queer readings move us beyond simplistic positive / negative binaries but they also free film analysis from the constraints of an ‘allegorically freighted’ academic culture.

The Trouble with Sex In 2008, Mark O’Halloran wrote in a special issue of Film Ireland on sex in Irish cinema that there had yet to be an erotic Irish film (2008, p. 5). While there have been a number of recent films (Ging and Canning 2012, Canning 2012) that feature



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explicit sexual content or themes – such as The Guard, The Trouble with Sex, and Sensation – these films tend to be devoid of eroticism and as such bear out Fintan Walsh’s claim that joyous, erotic, guilt‐free sex remains conspicuously absent on the Irish screen: … sexuality is curiously central to Irish film. Curious in the sense that it often functions as a highly symbolic device that shapes and critiques the ostensible world represented; more curious still in that it is a sexuality generally devoid of energy, feeling and ­eroticism. Viewed against the arthouse outputs of our European neighbours, for example, there is little in Irish film to match the easy sexiness of Fellini’s work, the latent carnality of Buñuel’s or the libidinous charge of Breillat’s. (2008, p. 16)

In spite of the sexual liberation wrought by the boom years, with the exception of Fintan Connolly’s Trouble with Sex (2006), there is still very little nudity, sexual explicitness, or eroticism in Irish cinema. As in Sensation, there is a certain sympathy evoked for the plight of the unsophisticated, emotionally naïve Irish male, who has been left behind by an economic boom strongly coded as feminine (McNally 2008, Connelly 2006b) and underpinned by the ‘you‐go‐girl’ mantras of consumerist postfeminism. According to Fintan Walsh, however, it is the void at the heart of these erotic failures that has produced Ireland’s most deeply moving films about sexuality or its absence, most notably in O’Halloran’s own work with Lenny Abrahamson. For Walsh, both Adam and Paul and Garage are important commentaries on Irish male sexuality in the sense that they mourn the absence of sex and of queerness in Irish film and culture. According to Walsh (2012, p. 204), these films embody ‘a queer representational aesthetic in Irish film, where desire and its excesses are cinematically animated through the collapse of difference and distinction’. Walsh cites Bersani and Dutoit’s (2004) Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity, in which they discuss how non‐normative relationships are engendered outside of language in films such as Le Mépris (1963), All About My Mother (1999), and The Thin Red Line (1998). Like the characters in these films, Walsh (2012, p. 207) contends that in Garage and Adam and Paul: … non‐normative relationships between men negotiate hostile social milieus, and queerness saturates the cinematic landscape as a mark of loss and exclusion, but also as a force of possibility in the face of a precarious present and an uncertain future. Perhaps rather surprisingly, none of the main characters in these films openly declare their sexual desires, let alone engage in sex with other people. But this ambivalence only adds to the films’ compelling queer resonances.

For Walsh, the ‘loose lyrical relationship between Adam and Paul’ (2012, p. 211) and their existence outside of materialism and the heteronormative family unit evoke non‐normative imaginaries. Likewise, he claims that in Garage, the silent

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companionship between Josie and teenage Goth David, as well as Josie’s love for the horse, invite us ‘to think desire beyond dialectics, in a way that complements Bersani’s and Dutoit’s writing on the self‐displacing effects of art, and in a manner which endeavours to dodge the deadlocks of narrative film and its criticism’ (Walsh 2012, p. 217). Josie’s humanist and spiritual response to rural isolation and loneliness, his love of nature and despair at Sully’s drowning of a litter of puppies stand out in stark contrast to Sensation’s engagement with isolated rural masculinity, which shows little belief in the transcendence of the human spirit. This analysis chimes with Ed Madden’s (2011) reading of Barry Dignam’s short film Chicken, which he contends ends on a moment of ‘queer possibility’. Madden argues that Chicken’s power derives from its queering ‘of a narrative that seems, at first, to depend on hegemonic tropes of traditional masculinity – aggression, repudiation of the feminine, and violence’. For Madden, Dignam’s film represents ‘a moment of queer potential’ that intervened into a highly charged historical moment of public concern about young men. Walsh’s and Madden’s reconsidering of the notion of queerness as a sort of non‐normative imagining or possibility allows us to read films that are not explicitly gay‐themed, such as Garage and Adam and Paul, to be read as ‘an aesthetic breach in the Irish cultural imaginary that both returns something of what has been repressed or refused recognition, and resists foreclosure in the present’ (Walsh 2012, p. 218).

Conclusion To the extent that a cohesive narrative trajectory can be traced in the story of gender and sexuality in Irish film, it is one of short‐lived cohesion, in which a state‐ endorsed vision of the patriarchal, heterosexual family was briefly achieved, followed by a period of intense, feminist‐inspired deconstruction (the First Wave), and subsequent waves of re‐construction (the second wave, the ‘lad wave’, and a new, more contemplative, wave evident in the work of Darragh Byrne, John Carney, and Lenny Abrahamson). Certainly, there is still evidence in contemporary Irish cinema of broader, gender‐political trends that are at work in popular culture more generally – the laddish obsession with anti‐PC ‘grotesquerie’ (Attwood 2005) of Sensation (2010), The Guard (2011) and The Hardy Bucks Movie (2013), an absence of strong, female‐driven narratives outside of chick flicks and romantic dramas such as How About You (2007) and Stay (2013) and inconclusive meditations on the nature of male violence in Savage (2009) and What Richard Did (2012). Savage, in particular, appears to tap into current discourses about social disintegration and ‘the end of men’ (Rosin 2010), whereby recourse to essentialist notions of wild or ‘savage’ behaviour provides momentary pleasures of escape from or resistance to the threat of emasculation, played out through Paul’s sexual inadequacy, castration, and subsequent re‐masculinisation. This mood of nihilism and angst seems to



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both reject and resign itself to the impossibility of patriarchal masculinity, with narrative closures that are at worst chaotic and at best deeply uncertain. On the other hand, the complex protagonists and meditative, humanist poetics of films such as Once (2006), Parked (2010), Eden (2008), Garage (2007), Adam and Paul, and Out of Here (2013) suggest that spaces are also opening up in Irish cinema for more self‐reflexive and non‐normative meditations on gender and sexuality, while Rebecca Daly’s The Other Side of Sleep (2011) signals the possibility of female‐centred drama outside of commercially palatable genres such as the chick flick. However, whether these more sensitive and ultimately more hopeful contemplations of gender and sexuality will continue to signal the absence of queer or non‐normative ­imaginings (Walsh 2012) or will actually begin to fill this void remains to be seen.

Notes 1 According to Rockett, the Irish film censors banned 3000 films and cut an additional 10 000 in the period from 1920 to 1970. 2 In 1984, a baby was found stabbed to death in a plastic fertiliser bag on a beach in Co. Kerry. Although a young single woman, Joanne Hayes, confessed to murdering her child, it was later discovered that she had given birth to a different baby, which was found buried in her garden. The incident became known as the ‘Kerry Babies’ affair. Also in 1984, Ann Lovett, a 15‐year‐old schoolgirl from Co. Longford, died giving birth beside a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Her infant son also died. 3 I use Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra’s (2007) concept of postfeminism here, which they define as ‘a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the “pastness” of feminism, whether that supposed “pastness” is merely noted, mourned or celebrated’. Unlike second‐wave feminism, therefore, ­postfeminism cannot be understood either as a distinct mode of political activism or as a coherently developed ideology but rather as a set of discursive responses  –  often serving contradictory agendas – to the perceived successes and failures of feminism. 4 The fact that Our Boys, a docu‐drama film about the influence of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, was broadcast by BBC2 but banned by RTE for over 10 years suggests that its searing critique of the damage caused by institutional Catholicism to Irish men was considered too controversial for general exhibition at that time. 5 Dead Bodies (2003) and Freeze Frame (2004) could also be included in this ‘cycle’, given their preoccupation with crime. Spin the Bottle (2002) and The Actors (2003) tend towards parody of underclass and gangster identities. Adam and Paul (2004) is not included because it addresses male social exclusion in very different terms, divorced from the codes and conventions of British Lad Culture. 6 The first feature film featuring gay characters made pre‐decriminalisation was Chaero (1988). 7 Walsh (2008) argues that in Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), ‘homosexuality, paedophilia, violence and religious corruption intersect and stand in opposition to the rugged ­masculinity of lay teacher William Franklin (Aidan Quinn) who promotes a new version of straight, secular homosociality associated with western modernity’.

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References Attwood, Feona (2005). “Tits and ass and porn and fighting”: male heterosexuality in magazines for men. International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (1): 83–100. Backus, Margot Gayle (1999). Revising resistance: In the Name of the Father as postcolonial paternal melodrama. In: Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa (ed. James MacKillop), 54–70. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Bersani, Leo and Dutoit, Ulysse (2004). Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: British Film Institute. Canning, Laura (2012). “Not in front of the American”: place, parochialism and linguistic play in John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. Estudios Irlandeses 7: 206–208. Chibnall, Steve (2001). Travels in Ladland: the British gangster film cycle, 1998–2001. In: The British Cinema Book, 2e (ed. Robert Murphy), 281–291. London: BFI Publishing. Connelly, Ailish. (2006a). ‘Accessorise with a child in New Ireland’. Irish Times (13 November). Connelly, Ailish. (2006b). ‘The Celtic kittens are in control’. Irish Times (11 December), p. 16. Cronin, Mike (2007). Is it for the glamour?: Masculinity, nationhood and amateurism in contemporary projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association. In: Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture (ed. Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan), 39–51. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Curtis, L.P. (1971). Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Farley, Fidelma (1999). Interrogating myths of maternity in Irish cinema: Margo Harkin’s Hush‐a‐Bye Baby. Irish University Review 29 (2): 219–223. Farley, Fidelma (2001). In the name of the family: masculinity and fatherhood in contemporary Northern Irish films. Irish Studies Review 9 (2): 203–213. Gibbons, Luke (1983). Lies that tell truth. The Crane Bag 7 (2): 148–155. Gibbons, Luke (1993). On the beach. Artforum 31 (2): 13. Ging, Debbie (2002). Screening the green: cinema under the Celtic Tiger. In: Reinventing Ireland: Culture and the Celtic Tiger (ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin), 177–195. London: Pluto. Ging, Debbie (2008). Goldfish memories? On seeing and hearing marginalised identities in contemporary Irish cinema. In: Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Class and Social Justice in Ireland (ed. Borbála Faragó and Moynagh Sullivan), 182–203. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Ging, Debbie (2013). Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ging, Debbie and Canning, Laura (2012). From rural electrification to rural pornification: Sensation’s poetics of dehumanisation. Estudios Irlandeses 7: 209–212. Greven, David (2002). Dude, where’s my gender? Contemporary teen comedies and new forms of American masculinity. Cineaste 27 (3): 14–21. Hanke, Robert (1998). Theorizing masculinity with/in the media. Communication Theory 8 (2): 183–203. Haslam, Richard (1999). “A race bashed in the face”: imagining Ireland as a damaged child. Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4: 1. Hayward, Susan (1993). French National Cinema. London: Routledge.



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Hill, John (1988). Images of violence. In: Cinema and Ireland (Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill), 147–193. London: Routledge. Hill, John (2006). Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London: BFI Publishing. Ketteman, Kerstin (1999). Cinematic images of Irish male brutality and the semiotics of landscape in The Field and Hear My Song. In: Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa (ed. James Mackillop), 153–160. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Lehner, Stefanie (2011). Post‐conflict masculinities: filiative reconciliation in Five Minutes of Heaven and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner. In: Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture (ed. Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen), 65–76. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Lynch, K and Lodge, A (2002). Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Madden, Ed (2011). Exploring masculinity: proximity, intimacy and Chicken. In: Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture (ed. Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen), 77–88. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. McKillop, James (ed.) (1999). Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute. McNally, Frank. (2008). ‘An Irishman’s diary‘, Irish Times (25 June), p. 15. Monk, Claire (1999). From underworld to underclass: crime and British cinema in the 1990s. In: British Crime Cinema (ed. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy), 172–188. London: Routledge. Monk, Claire (2000). Men in the 90s. In: British Cinema of the 90s (ed. Robert Murphy), 15–66. London: BFI. Moser, Joseph (2004). Fighting within the rules: masculinity in the films of Jim Sheridan. In: National Cinema and Beyond: Studies in Irish Film 1 (ed. Kevin Rockett and John Hill), 89–96. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Moser, Joseph (2013). Irish Masculinity on Screen: The Pugilists and Peacemakers of John Ford, Jim Sheridan and Paul Greengrass. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Murphy, Jenny (2003). “The quare ones”: finding a male homosexual space within Irish cinema. Film and Film Culture 2: 69–77. Nandy, Ashis (1983). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nixon, Sean (1997). Exhibiting masculinity. In: Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (ed. Stuart Hall), 291–336. London: Sage. Norman, James and Galvin, Miriam (2006). Straight Talk: An Investigation of Attitudes and Experiences of Homophobic Bullying in Second‐Level Schools. Dublin: City University, Centre for Educational Evaluation. O’Connor, Barbara (1984). Aspects of representation of women in Irish film. The Crane Bag 8 (2): 79–83. O’Halloran, Mark (2008). Editorial. Film Ireland 120: 5. Pettitt, Lance (1999). A construction site queered: “gay” images in new Irish cinema. Cineaste 24: 61–64.

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Pettitt, Lance (2000). Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pfeil, Fred (1995). White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. New York: Verso. Pramaggiore, Maria (1999). “I kinda liked you as a girl”: masculinity, postcolonial queens, and the “nature” of terrorism in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. In: Contemporary Irish Cinema: From The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa (ed. James MacKillop), 85–97. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Rockett, Kevin (1996). The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896–1996. Dublin:: Red Mountain Media. Rockett, Kevin (1999). Irish cinema: the national in the international. Cineaste 24 (2–3): 23–25. Rockett, Kevin (2004). Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Rosin, Hanna. (2010). ‘The End of Me‘. Atlantic Magazine, July/August. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the‐end‐of‐men/8135 (accessed 13 October 2018). Sconce, Jeffrey (2002). Irony, nihilism and the new American “smart” film. Screen 43 (4): 349–369. Smith, Paul (ed.) (1996). Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stoneman, Rod (2005). The sins of commission II. Screen 46 (2): 247–264. Tarr, Carrie (2004). Masculinity and exclusion in post‐1995 Beur and Banlieu films. In: The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (ed. P Powrie, A Davis and B Babington), 110–120. London: Wallflower Press. Tasker, Yvonne and Negra, Diane (2007). Introduction: feminist politics and postfeminist culture. In: Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra), 1–26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walsh, Fintan (2008). Cock tales: homosexuality, trauma and the cosmopolitan queer. Film Ireland 120 ( January/February): 16–18. Walsh, Fintan (2012). Mourning sex: the aesthetics of queer relationality in contemporary film. In: Theorising the Visual: New Directions in Irish Cultural Studies (ed. Claire Bracken and Emma Radley), 215–228. Cork: Cork University Press. Yuval‐Davis, Nira (1997). Gender and Nation. London: Sage.

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Space and Place in Irish Cinema Conn Holohan

Introduction In a climactic sequence of the 2003 crime‐caper Intermission ( John Crowley 2003), a film that has until this point confined its action to the suburbs of Dublin, there is  a revealing exchange on the nature of place in Irish cinema. The sequence depicts a high‐speed car chase between rogue detective Gerry (Colm Meaney) and his criminal nemesis Lehiff (Colin Farrell), following an elaborate, if sham‑ bolic, kidnapping plot. As they race through the streets, their surroundings sud‑ denly shift from suburban to rural, tree‐lined lanes. The camera lingers on Gerry’s face as he ominously mutters, ‘He’s going to the country. You’re out of your element now pal’, to which his partner Ben (Tomas O’Suilleabháin) replies, ‘So are we, Gerry’. Instantly, a tractor appears in Lehiff ’s path and he is forced to swerve to avoid it, causing his car to spin out of control and slam into a sheep in a neighbouring field. As Gerry and Ben struggle from their car in pursuit an eerie silence descends, offset by the rising tones of Celtic music. Gerry and Lehiff face off against the background of desolate field and distant mountains, a confronta‑ tion that ends in injury and death. The sudden shift in tone of the scene is significant; the unsettling use of sound and the unease of the characters mark the rural as a space of death, an association heightened by the sight of Gerry performing a mercy killing on the sheep that Lehiff has hit. Here, the countryside is presented as a space of alienation and disquiet, beyond the pale of modern rationality, in which these characters are quite clearly not at home. By travelling the short distance to the countryside from Dublin’s suburban periphery, they have journeyed not just in space, but also in time, back into Ireland’s rural past where a sheep and a tractor pose the greatest danger to travelling motorists. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The scene restates a key binary in Irish cinematic representations, between the urban and the rural, in which the latter is alternately depicted as a pastoral repos‑ itory of cultural authenticity or a repressive site of outdated conservative values. The recurring focus on this urban/rural opposition, both within Irish film and Irish film writing, indicates the enduring power of landscape to signify within the Irish cultural tradition. Any attempt to elaborate the operations of space and place within Irish cinema, therefore, must situate its analysis within a cinematic and cultural context that includes the historical genesis of this tradition, as well as the ‘place’ that Ireland occupies within a globalised system of image exchange. It is, by now, a critical commonplace that over the past 20 years a ‘spatial turn’ has occurred in the humanities, with an ever greater focus on the spatial dimension of cultural production being evident across the disciplinary divides. Drawing on the conceptual approaches of French theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, critical writings in the fields of literature, film and beyond have increasingly understood space as a social construction that exists in a dynamic relationship to the culture it produces. As Barney Warf and Santa Arias insist: ‘Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that every‑ thing happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’ (2009, p. 1). Within film studies, this emphasis on space can be seen in publications such as Cinema and Landscape (2010), Cinema and the City (2001), and The Cinematic City (1997). Indeed, as these titles suggest, the particular focus of film theory has frequently been on the relationship between cinematic and urban space, unsurprising perhaps given their shared significance to the ­experience of twentieth century modernity. However, in a Q&A in Screen, the geographer Doreen Massey cautions against making too quick ‘a leap’ from ­discussions of space as dynamic multiplicity to the specific example of the urban, without adequately acknowledging that the mobility of the city is merely ‘a hyper‑ version of spatiality in general’ (Lury and Massey 1999, p. 231). She suggests that an excessive focus on cinema’s seemingly symbiotic relation to the city may serve to close off enquiry into the productive relation between film and spatiality more generally. Indeed, one effect of this elision of space qua multiplicity and the city space in particular is that it leaves the rural as somehow other to this dynamic ­spatiality and reinforces what Massey elsewhere labels the ‘dubious’ duality ‘so popular and persistent between space and place’ (2005, p. 68). The danger, in other words, is that the rural is understood as a residual spatial order in which space is not a product of ever‐changing relations but ‘somehow originarily regionalized … always‐already divided up’ (Massey 2005, p. 6). As suggested above, critical responses to Irish film have frequently wrestled with a body of images which seem to reinforce just such a dualistic understanding of space and place, and have sought to reinscribe the iconic rural scenes of Irish cinema within a wider spatial context of global economic and cultural flows. What we must resist is any understanding of place as a bounded and stable geographic location, a perspective that does not acknowledge the social processes and spatial relations which produce a particular



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sense of place at a specific moment in time. This chapter will track the changing ways in which space and place have been visualised within Irish film and conceptu‑ alised in Irish film writing. In so doing, it will map the shifting social relations and cultural concerns that are constitutive of an Irish cinematic space, tracing the shift from an overriding concern with Ireland’s colonial legacy to an increasing desire to locate Ireland within the coordinates of contemporary global capitalism. It will argue that, despite the over‐identification of Irish cinema with particular locations and landscapes, Irish films have often been deficient in their expression of the lived experience of place. Finally, it will offer a few tentative examples of films that meaningfully engage with the local while reaching beyond the parochial in their aesthetisation of landscape and their mode of cinematic address.

An Inherited Tradition In the first sustained academic survey of Irish cinema, Cinema and Ireland, written by Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, and first published in 1987 fol‑ lowed by a revised edition in 1988, the history of Ireland’s sporadic attempts to develop a film industry up to that point are combined with an overview of the representational traditions through which ­cinematic images of Ireland might be understood. As Gibbons points out, from the first films produced in Ireland by the American Kalem company in the 1910s, place has been centrally important to Ireland’s cinematic identity. Indeed, such was the importance of Irish scenery to these early films’ allure that, in some cases, images of well‐known beauty spots were inserted, replete with captions to identify them, despite their appearance being completely unmotivated by plot (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 223). This emphasis on a picturesque Irish landscape would seem to be targeted at an Irish‐American audience and their presumed desire to return home, if only via the cinematic imaginary. Nevertheless, the narrative structure of the Kalem films, as Rockett makes clear, frequently emphasises America as the escape route from Ireland’s poverty and politics, thereby ensuring that for all the pastoral pleasures that Ireland might offer, the emigrant’s decision to leave remains vindicated (Rockett et  al. 1988, p. 9). Thus, as Cinema and Ireland’s discussion of Irish film more generally makes clear, from the earliest years of the medium’s history cinematic construc‑ tions of Ireland as place have been determined by the cultural biases and represen‑ tational strategies of audiences and producers beyond its own shores. In a chapter on violence within Irish‐set films, John Hill proposes a broad ­schematic by which Ireland’s onscreen identity might be better understood. As he points out, in the absence of any sustained indigenous film industry up to the 1980s, cinematic images of Ireland had largely been produced by the cinemas of Britain and the United States. While the films emerging from the latter tended to depict Ireland as a bucolic rural idyll, suggesting the nostalgic look back of an

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Irish‐American gaze, British films about Ireland more often expressed a much darker vision of the country as a violent, trouble‐wracked land. This, Hill suggests, is a direct legacy of Britain’s military and political involvement in Ireland and draws on a long British representational history of depicting the Irish as atavistic and savage. From Elizabethan commentaries to British gangster films of the 1970s, he argues, Irish violence has been portrayed as a defect of nature rather than the product of specific political circumstances, an interpretation which, not inciden‑ tally, absolves the British state of any responsibility for acts of violence which have occurred in the country (Rockett et al. 1988, pp. 147–193). What is interesting for our purposes here is how the Irish landscape becomes in these representations a symbiotic expression of a volatile Irish people, suggesting an ‘osmosis between climate and character’ (Rockett et  al. 1988, p. 211) which elides the social in its construction of Ireland as place. In one of Hill’s key examples, the story of an Irish Republican Army gunman on the run in Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947) becomes an expressionistic meditation on environment as fate, evading in the process any analysis of the socio‐historical context which has produced Irish political violence (Rockett et al. 1988, pp. 152–160) (Figure 22.1). Making a similar point in his own survey of Irish cinema, Lance Pettitt describes David Lean’s decision to film the intimate story of Ryan’s Daughter (1970) as a Super Panavision epic as ‘symptom‑ atic of a broader history of British cinematic representations of Irish landscape, history and sexuality … an aesthetic that sees individual psychology as a function

Figure 22.1  ‘Environment as fate’: Odd Man Out (1947).



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of the natural environment’ (Pettitt 2000, p. 99). In films such as Ryan’s Daughter and Odd Man Out, it is as if behaviour is born directly from the landscape which contains it, without the intervening structures of economics, politics, and society to condition and determine its expression. Indeed, Gibbons identifies the omission of the socio‐economic, specifically in the form of work, as the common represen‑ tational thread which unites the seemingly disparate visions of Ireland which have emerged from Britain and the United States (Rockett et al. 1988, pp. 194–203). In both their pastoral and violent iterations, images of Ireland position it firmly outside the pale of modern industrial life, thereby avoiding the everyday realities of labour and economic exchange. Crucially, as we shall see, the ubiquity of this romantic vision of Ireland has ensured that audiences have tended to encounter the country in literature, and later cinema, ‘with an imagination well furnished with preconceived images’ (Rockett et al. 1988, p. 194).

The Space of National Cinema As this brief discussion illustrates, Irish film criticism has long been sensitive to the need to critically interrogate cinema’s encounter with space and place. Indeed, one of the basic purposes of a book such as Cinema and Ireland is to demarcate a space within the global flow of cinematic images for films to be produced, ­analysed, and consumed as specifically and meaningfully Irish. Alongside later publications such as Lance Pettit’s Screening Ireland (2000), Martin McLoone’s Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (2000), and Ruth Barton’s Irish National Cinema (2004), the book is engaged, among other things, in an act of national cinema construction, the aim of which is to establish a coherency, rooted in geography, of a diverse set of images and institutional structures. As Andrew Higson reminds us, the mobilisation of the national as an analytical category within film studies tends to be motivated by both support for an indigenous film industry and a desire to explore questions of ‘national character’ (1989, p. 36) which can quickly shift from the descriptive to prescriptive in its assertion of what a national cinema ‘ought’ to be (1989, p. 37). Quite often, a particular national cinema comes to be identified with a particular group of auteurs or a specific aesthetic style, fulfilling, Higson suggests, a marketing function similar to that of genre by promising audiences a consistent cinematic experience across a range of film titles (1989, p. 38). What is interesting in the case of Irish film, however, is how landscape has stood in for such a set of auteurs or aesthetics as the distinguishing characteristic of an Irish national cinema both domestically and abroad. Furthermore, it is questions of landscape and location which have provoked the most furious debates internally around what Irish cinema is and ought to be. In the introduction to her own book‐length survey of Irish national cinema, Ruth Barton proposes a trajectory within Irish culture ‘from being the

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articulation of an aspiration (revolution), to the expression of a collective identity (the stabilisation of the nation‐state) to a means of fracturing that identity (post‑ modern identity politics)’ (Barton 2004, p. 9). The films discussed in her volume, she asserts, generally reflect some stage in this trajectory, thus implying an ­evolutionary model of national cinema which is echoed by other key academic writings on Irish film. Drawing on the writings of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon, both Pettitt and McLoone frame their analyses of Irish film in relation to a cultural process in which the overweening desire of a colonised people to assert a distinctive and collective identity is gradually super‑ seded by an acknowledgement of diversity and the rejection of a monolithic national culture. Although all these writers are alive to the complexity of this process and are careful not to describe Irish cinema as a succession of clearly defined stages, they do nevertheless trace a historical development in the subjects and themes of Irish films, shifts which are themselves given expression to a large extent through changing onscreen spatial arrangements. The explicatory power of postcolonial theory for any history of Irish cinema can be considered in relation to two intertwined processes. The first is the histor‑ ical relationship between Ireland and Britain which, as suggested above, produced a British representational tradition which justified the colonisation of Ireland as the civilisation of an inherently violent race. At the same time, an Irish cultural‐ nationalist response established a set of counter‐images which valorised an authentic Irish identity distinguished primarily by those characteristics which dif‑ ferentiated it from being British. Key among these characteristics, as McLoone points out, was the siting of this authentic Irishness on the country’s rural, west‑ ern seaboard, a spatial association which has had long representational resonances throughout the history of Irish cinema (McLoone 2000, pp. 18–21). The second way in which Irish cinema has been understood through the prism of colonisa‑ tion was captured in a pointed phrase by then Minister for Arts Michael D. Higgins in 1995. In justifying state economic support of film as a necessary cultural response to the global dominance of Hollywood cinema, he described the last great colonisation as the ‘colonisation of the imagination’ (cited in McLoone 2000, p. 118). For much of the twentieth century, Ireland on film had largely been an invention of the British and American film industries, the legacy of which was to furnish the imaginations of film audiences and filmmakers, in Ireland and abroad, with a body of cinematic images of the country which had, at best, a distorted relation to any actual existing location. It was this second colonising process, as well as the legacy of a stifling cultural nationalism, to which the first sustained wave of indigenous Irish filmmaking in the 1970s and 1980s offered a response. Concerned with exploring the complexities of Irish identity which had hitherto been absent from the screen, one primary means by which these film‑ makers articulated their criticism of received images of Ireland was through the signifying power of landscape.



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Enter the Urban Outlining the issues and themes shared by the films which emerged from Ireland in this first fertile period of indigenous production, McLoone suggest that high on the list of their concerns was the desire to interrogate the rural mythology under‑ pinning cultural nationalism and to bring a previously ignored urban experience onto the screen (2000, p. 128). As he points out, filmmakers such as Bob Quinn and Joe Comerford, working independently and in a European art‐cinema tradition of formal experimentation, offered deliberately bleak visions of rural Ireland which undercut its traditional associations with enduring nationalist values. Meanwhile films such as Cathal Black’s Pigs (1984), which concerned a group of socially ­marginalised people living in a Georgian Dublin tenement, and The Courier (Frank Deasy and Joe Lee, 1988), a drug‐dealing, crime thriller set on the streets of the capital, offered the first tentative expressions of Irish urban life on film. Nevertheless, despite the questioning of existing rural representations and an expanded focus to include contemporary city life, the engagement with place in these films remains to a large extent locked within a binary oppositional structure. As Rockett points out, in an article appropriately entitled ‘(Mis‐)Representing the Irish Urban Landscape’, lacking a tradition of urban imagery to draw upon, within Irish cultural production ‘the old country/city dichotomy is never far away’ (2001, p. 223). Stretching back to John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), in which Sean Thornton ( John Wayne) returns to the pastoral idyll of Inisfree to escape the ravages of industrial Pittsburgh, the organic community of the rural has long been counter‑ poised against the alienating individualism of the city space. Even those films which critique the rural as oppressive in its denial of individual freedom retain this association, even if belonging is now figured in a negative light. The lingering power of this dichotomy, evidence of which is clear in the example which opened this chapter, produces images of both the urban and the rural which fail to fully engage with their specificities and multiplicities as place. As McLoone surmises, given the long‐enduring myth of rural Ireland, the challenge for Irish cinema ‘is finding an aesthetic capable of rendering the city experience in all its complexity without falling into the trap of rural prejudice’ (2000, p. 203). Indeed, representations of the urban in contemporary film have tended to express either a utopian image of the city as a site of freedom from the repressive ideologies of the past, or have equated the city with crime and chaos due to the dissolution of those same ideologies. The former attitude is given ample expres‑ sion in a number of Dublin‐set rom‐coms which were produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while the latter is evident in such diverse films as the fantasy‑tinged Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992) and the mythic/realist tale of Dublin’s working‐ class horse culture, Crush Proof (Paul Tickell, 1998). While these representational patterns are obviously not unique to Irish cinema, what has been lacking, as noted

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by McLoone and others, is a social‐realist tradition which might connect the lived realities of the city’s inhabitants to the social and economic structures which deter‑ mine them (McLoone 2000). As is evident in the work of British filmmakers such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, the narrative form and stylistic conventions of social‐realist filmmaking tend to emphasise the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion which are inherent to any experience and understanding of social and physical space. This works to situate localised experience within the wider struc‑ tures of class, ethnicity, gender, and so on, which collectively shape the individual’s existence within society. Yet in Irish cinema, questions of inclusion and exclusion have often been posed in reductive, oppositional terms, concerned more with the emotional and imaginative power of the Irish landscape to produce the experience of belonging than with the actual social and economic structures that shape con‑ temporary Irish life. One consequence of this has been the exclusion of the urban itself, as the space least endowed with such imaginative power. In my own analysis of urban images in contemporary Irish cinema (Holohan 2010), I suggest that Dublin’s relative invisibility onscreen can be understood as a consequence of the failure to monumentalise the city in Irish culture. Henri Lefebvre describes the monument as a space which confers a sacred aspect upon authority and ‘offer[s] each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 225). Yet the ability of the city, and of Dublin in particular, to offer such an image is rendered problematic by its one‐time status as the seat of colonial power. Indeed, this problem can be under‑ stood in specifically visual terms, as the mark of the coloniser is most evident in the very architecture that marks Dublin as distinctive, in particular its impressive Georgian buildings, once described in the Irish parliament as ‘the expendable ­left‐over of an arrogant and alien ruling class’ (cited in Lincoln 1993, p. 212). The  ambiguity of Dublin’s position within Ireland’s self‐image is given apt ­expression in Terry Eagleton’s description of Ulysses as a work which celebrates and undermines the Irish national formation at a stroke, deploying the full battery of modernist technique to re‐create it while suggesting with its every breath just how easily it could have done the same for Bradford or the Bronx. (Eagleton 1988, p. 36)

Thus, the city’s enduring association with modernity will inevitably trouble its position within a national culture which founded a distinctive political identity upon an imagined rural nation, the legitimacy of which was predicated upon its absolute separation from the forces of modern life. The challenge for filmmakers and critics alike, therefore, is to articulate the complex set of national and transna‑ tional forces which shape the contemporary city. One of the aims of my own criti‑ cal engagement with the city on film has been to move beyond metaphorical readings of the city as nation and interrogate the operations of power which deter‑ mine ways of being and belonging within the urban space. One of the most



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productive terrains upon which to develop such analysis is in relation to gender and sexuality, the expressions of which have been thoroughly re‐imagined within contemporary city films.

‘Hip Hedonism’ and the Politics of Place Writing in a 2007 collection exploring Irish cinema’s intersection with genre, McLoone discusses the physical and imaginative transformation which Dublin experienced from the early 1990s, after almost a century of economic and cultural neglect within an Irish state ideologically predisposed towards the prioritisation of all things rural: In the new Ireland that emerged in the 1990s, the city and urban‐ness in general has finally assumed the kind of cultural and ideological dominance that its economic importance would warrant. A characteristic of this new ideological hegemony has been the emergence of more celebratory invocations of the city and none more so than is reflected in the theme and style of some recent cinema. (McLoone 2007, p. 212)

He coins the term ‘hip hedonism’ to capture the style and thematic approach of a set of urban films which emerged in Ireland from the late 1990s and which was epitomised in romantic comedies such as When Brendan Met Trudy (Kieron J. Walsh, 2000), About Adam (Gerry Stembridge, 2001), and Goldfish Memory (Liz Gill, 2003) (Figure 22.2). These films, suggests McLoone, evince ‘a kind of transglobal cool … of luxurious apartments and well‐appointed offices’ (McLoone 2007), inhabiting a

Figure 22.2  ‘Hip hedonism’: Goldfish Memory (2003).

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cosmopolitan culture that firmly locates Dublin within the celebratory discourse of a particular moment in global capitalism. They aim to transcend any narrow sense of place by drawing heavily on the codes and conventions of Hollywood genre films. This is a Dublin of attractive young people, conspicuous consump‑ tion, and digitally enhanced vistas which lend it ‘an almost subliminal sense of well‐being’ (2007, p. 213). Key to this re‐imagining of the Irish screenscape, McLoone claims, is the association of Dublin with ‘promiscuous sexual abandon, the new cinema’s final affront to the values of the old Ireland’ (2007, p. 212). The characters of Goldfish Memory switch sexual partners and orientation with dizzying regularity, while About Adam depicts, in relentlessly upbeat tones, the seduction of an entire family by the eponymous Adam, who arrives unbidden into their lives one day in an upmarket Dublin café. These films challenge the traditional reper‑ toire of gendered and sexual identities available within Irish cinema, which were, as Barton claims, often so burdened by symbolic weight that they lacked ‘any organic relationship to the lived experience of their real life prototypes’ (Barton 2004, p. 114). Rejecting a representational history which enshrined the desexual‑ ised female body as an idealised image of nation, they celebrate a sexuality that is fluid, self‐fulfilling and, above all, freely expressed. In a detailed textual analysis of Goldfish Memory, Natalie Harrower emphasises the importance of the spatial to the film’s reimagining of national and sexual iden‑ tities, suggesting that such is the tradition of associating Irish identity with landscape that ‘providing new, queer images of [that] identity requires a flushing out of the existing lexicon of landscape imagery’ (Harrower 2007, p. 217). She argues that the iconography of the film, while recognisable as Dublin to a local audience, deliberately avoids scenes or settings which might draw it back into an existing body of cinematic images which are ‘marked by a surfeit of memory and remembrance’ (2007, p. 219). Instead we get a ‘present‐centered’, Celtic Tiger Dublin in which the power of history and tradition to regulate space is dissipated, as is evident, for example, in the breakdown of distinctions between private and public space, as the sexual exchanges of the protagonists move fluidly and uninhib‑ itedly between both (2007, pp. 223–224). While Harrower analyses the film’s spatial imagery in positive terms, suggest‑ ing that it enables the emergence of a properly queer sensibility, this desire to re‐imagine the spaces of the city in a manner which evacuates history resonates with a wider set of cultural trends approached more critically by Diane Negra. Describing ‘the metallic sheen of [the] new Dublin landscape’ which sprang up in the Celtic Tiger years, Negra argues that in this spatial reconstruction of the city, ‘traditional conceptions of the social geography of Ireland’ are replaced with a new image of ‘flexible’ Irishness, ‘celebrated for its ability to behave like global capital itself ’ (Negra 2010, p. 839). In this light, the urban images of Celtic Tiger cinema can seem less like a utopian celebration of sexual freedom than an uncrit‑ ical embrace of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism. Indeed, such is the erasure of Ireland’s traditional spatial imagery in both the urban cinematic images of the late



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1990s and early 2000s and in the urban spaces themselves, that they seem to aspire to what anthropologist Marc Augé terms the ‘non‐place’. He uses this term to describe ‘the spaces of supermodernity’, such as shopping malls, airports, and motorways, in which any sense of the local or of history are sacrificed for a homo‑ geneity of purpose which is ultimately determined by the social and economic structures of global capitalism (Augé 2009). If place, as traditionally understood, can be considered as ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (Augé 2009, p. 63), then non‐places are governed by a ‘solitary contractuality’ (2009, p. 76), an individual relationship to space which is predicated upon the promise of personal gratification. In these contemporary Irish comedies, it seems, the city itself is an image to be consumed, a space of gratification for characters and audi‑ ence alike, in which the social and economic determinants of belonging remain stubbornly obscure. It may seem misguided to charge romantic comedies with failing to engage with the politics of place, given the genre’s long association with the city as site of personal and romantic fulfilment. From Mr Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) to You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), the city has facilitated the overcoming of social difference, and it is just such celebratory conventions that Irish filmmakers seem keen to adapt to Ireland’s urban spaces. Indeed, the director of Goldfish Memory, Liz Gill, explicitly describes the upbeat imagery of her film as a response to the bleak rural images which she believed were responsible for turning audi‑ ences off Irish films, expressing her hope that this visual approach would bring a mainstream audience to a film which presents a broad range of sexual desires and identities (Harrower 2007, pp. 218–222). Nevertheless, the relatively superficial engagement with the particularities of place in much of the cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s can be seen as a major cause of their failure to achieve suc‑ cess as either generic entertainment or as meaningful interventions in Ireland’s understanding of itself. Citing Sight and Sound’s description of About Adam as a film ‘without a clear sense of local identity’ (Macnab 2001, p. 38), Barton describes Stembridge’s film as ‘a production that responds to a culturally specific desire not to be culturally specific’ (Barton 2004, p. 112). Sharing Goldfish Memory’s desire to escape the weight of Irish iconographic tradition, About Adam avoids Dublin’s rec‑ ognisable landmarks, such as they are, as well as the rural landscapes that might immediately locate the film for an international audience. Yet the response of the Sight and Sound critic, as well as the film’s failure at the US and UK box offices, indi‑ cates the extent to which landscape functions as the signifier of Irish cinema for such audiences. While Irish filmmakers’ eagerness to escape the deadweight of a restrictive representational tradition may be understandable, in uncritically adopt‑ ing the lexicon of Hollywood genre, Irish films risk losing any distinctiveness in an international film market which continues to favour clichéd images of rural Irish life. This is made all the more evident by the relative success of films such as Waking Ned (Kirk Jones, 1998) and Leap Year (Anand Tucker, 2010), in which Ireland remains a bucolic fantasy rather than an actually existing place.

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As well as failing to capture the imaginations of cinema audiences, however, a further criticism to be levelled at these films is that the visions they present of a  modern, liberal Ireland are far less challenging than they may at first seem, ­particularly in their representation of same‐sex desire. In her analysis of queer urban spaces in Goldfish Memory and the Limerick‐set Cowboys and Angels (David Gleeson, 2003), Allison Macleod suggests that these films depict utopian visions of ‘an Irish urbanity reclaimed by the LGBT groups that have been historically dis‑ criminated against and excluded by the Irish state’ (MacLeod 2014, p. 43). However, she argues, a close reading of the textual operations of these films reveals a strategy of containment, in which queer sexualities and spaces are compartmentalised in a manner which ultimately reinforces the heteronormativity of public space. Discussing the relationship between the two central protagonists of Cowboys and Angels, straight civil servant Shane and gay art student Vincent, she describes the commodified queer spaces of the film, such as the flat which the men share and the night club which Vincent provides access to, as ‘exoticised surroundings’ which facilitate Shane’s emergence as a social and sexual being without in any way threat‑ ening the certainty of his heterosexuality. Furthermore, by the film’s coda, we see a complete marginalisation of the film’s gay character, with Shane confidently occupying the private and public spaces of Limerick city whilst Vincent has left for America, ‘shifting beyond the periphery and out of Irish society altogether’ (2014, p. 52). Similarly, my own analysis of Goldfish Memory suggests that the film’s attempts to queer the city space through the public expression of non‐hetero desire is undermined by a conservative cinematic grammar which reinstates the boundaries of public/private and hetero/non‐. In particular, I focus on three instances in the film, in which lesbian desire is physically or verbally expressed outside of the domestic space, ‘potentially disturbing both the patriarchal confine‑ ment of female sexuality to the private sphere and the heterosexist banishment of homosexuality to the closet’ (Holohan 2009, p. 143). Yet in each example, this potential is undermined by the foregrounding of a male response to this visible lesbian sexuality which marks it as incongruous. What is more, I argue, through mise‐en‐scène and editing, the film aligns the spectator with this male diegetic viewer, reinforcing gendered dynamics of looking and revealing its own ambiva‑ lent commitment to a properly queer cityscape. In an analysis of gay representation in Irish film in the years 1984 to 1995, Pettitt makes the point that gayness functions largely metaphorically in Irish films of this period, as a symbol of aberrance or criminality, reinforcing a dominant discourse which figured ‘the words “gay and Irish” as mutually repellent’ (1997, p. 254). If  such attitudes have diminished in the years since this essay’s publication, the ­tentative sexual politics of the films discussed above suggest that images of ­homosexuality in Irish film nevertheless continue to fulfil a largely metaphorical role as symbols of a progressive, cosmopolitan nation, and that actual experi‑ ences of l­esbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) life in Ireland continue to go ­unexamined. Such a reading has been emphasised in a number of critical responses



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to these films (Ging 2008; Gillespie 2008; Holohan 2009), and would seem to belie the suggestion that Irish films and the Irish cultural climate more generally have moved beyond an obsessive concern with nation to explore the kind of diverse identity politics which is characteristic of latter stages of postcolonial cultural development. As these examples illustrate, we can trace the failure to develop such a politics, in Irish cinema at least, to a concomitant failure to engage with the socio‐economic geography of place.

Conclusion: The New Cosmopolitans? Writing on the importance of geographical location within the Irish cultural imaginary, Sean O’Tuama suggests it ‘unlikely that feeling for place … is found so deeply rooted, and so widely celebrated, in any western European culture as it is in Irish culture’ (1995, p. 22). O’Tuama traces this intense ‘feeling for place’ back to early‐medieval verse and up into the writings of twentieth‐century poets such as Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. Between these periods, lay the experience of conquest and colonisation, and the sense of loss occasioned by such experience produced, for O’Tuama, a literature which ‘hover[s] on the edge of heartbreak’ (1995, p. 25). However, Patrick Sheeran (1988) suggests that the Irish preoccupa‑ tion with place has less to do with a political or conservational commitment to geographic locations than with the act of naming as remembrance. In a wide‐ ranging discussion which moves from fourteenth‐century Gaelic literature to Ireland’s underdeveloped planning laws, he argues that the Irish have never dwelt in the Heideggerean sense of constructing and caring for the material environ‑ ment, that the myth of place has always triumphed over the ambivalences and degradations of the actual physical reality. Describing the Joycean at Sandymount strand, in thrall to a literary Dublin that supersedes his physical location, Sheeran evocatively writes: ‘He sees not sea and polluted sand but the ghost of Stephen Dedalus who came there in the dreamtime to read the signatures of all things’ (Sheeran 1988 , p. 206). It is such an attitude, perhaps, that has facilitated the com‑ modification of Irish landscape as so much raw material for the cine‐fantasies of audiences at home and abroad, and hindered the development of a social‐realist corpus of films which seek to explore the intricacies and ambiguities of geographical and social space. Since the rapid reversal of Ireland’s economic fortunes in 2008, however, the fantasies of place which have underpinned the Irish cinematic imaginary have experienced a forceful encounter with the economic forces which determine our ability to belong. The ease of belonging which characterises the cinematic visions of traditional rural Ireland or the urban utopias of contemporary Irish genre film have become increasingly challenging to imagine within a media environment which has pressed the reality of Ireland’s imbrication within a set of global

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financial structures upon the national consciousness. The comforting fiction of Ireland as a place apart is no longer a viable one, while the confident equation of urban Ireland with a cosmopolitan culture which transcends geographical borders has been undermined by the experience of economic hardship and an interna‑ tional media discourse in which Ireland has become a nationally specific signifier of global financial collapse. In this context, Irish cinema’s engagement with place has undergone a significant re‐imagination since the mid‐2000s. While the horror genre has experienced something of a naissance since that time, with numerous films envisioning the rural as an abject site of terror, there have also been a number of indigenous productions which combine a lyrical exploration of the poetics of place with the probing eye of a realist camera concerned with penetrating the actual conditions of belonging in twenty‐first‐century Ireland. Filmmakers such as Lenny Abrahamson, Lance Daly, and Gerard Barrett have anchored their depic‑ tions of place firmly in the experience of their inhabitants, whether that be a mid‑ dle‐aged farmer in Kerry or a pair of Dublin teenagers on the run. Drawing on a realist aesthetic that is nevertheless indebted to the conventions of European art cinema, films such as Garage (Lenny Abrahamson, 2007), Kisses (Lance Daly, 2008), and Pilgrim Hill (Gerard Barrett, 2013) have productively explored a tension bet‑ ween rootedness in the local and a transcendence that connects the particularities of action and place to more universal human experience. It is with just such an example that I would like to conclude this brief overview of space and place in Irish cinema, by discussing a film which precisely captures the troubled nature of belonging for the generation of Irish youth who have come of age in the post‐Celtic Tiger era. In both its production history and its formal struc‑ ture, Out of Here (Donal Foreman, 2013) illustrates the productive possibilities when the restrictive geographies of national cinema are opened up to encounter. An abiding feeling of disconnect from its spatial environs permeates the carefully crafted film, which follows Ciaran (Fionn Walton), a Dubliner in his early twenties, who has just returned from a period of travelling abroad and is struggling to recon‑ nect with the city and friends that he left behind. While the film attentively lingers on the spaces of the city, endowing them with an enticing lyrical quality, the com‑ position and narrative nevertheless refuse any straightforward visual pleasure for the audience. The framing and editing as well as the use of sound frequently function to displace the protagonist from the centre of the frame and to echo his own sense of uncertain belonging. Ciaran’s anxieties are rarely addressed frontally by the film but rather haunt the edges of the frame, like his unemployed father who silently potters on the periphery of the narrative action. Ciaran’s family home is filmed in cold, unwelcoming tones, while the streets he escapes to alienate him by their very familiarity, reminding him, as he declares towards the film’s climax, ‘of shit that is over’. Indeed, the film’s refusal to sentimentalise the connection with place is given explicit expression in this speech, in which he tells a group of strangers of a romantic encounter he had with an American girl on his travels in Vietnam. He recounts how he spent a night with her, watching the sunrise and



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reinventing himself to a stranger who knew nothing of his past, before he woke up in a cheap hotel room to find that the girl had stolen all his belongings. Our past remains determining, this speech implies, and the exotic promises of an unfamiliar space can only conceal the underlying structures of exploitation and exclusion upon which the fantasies of the global traveller depend. The irony of the film’s title is evident in its awareness that there is no ‘there’ to which we can escape. Stylistically and thematically resonant with the corpus of ‘mumblecore’ films to emerge from the US in recent years, Out of Here is thus a film which explores a ­specifically Irish experience of unbelonging within a transnational aesthetic form. Yet unlike the cosmopolitan spaces of Celtic Tiger cinema in which locality provided little more than colour to international generic forms, the local and the  global here form a productive tension. This is expressed both through the protagonist’s uneasy relationship to home and through a visual style which gives authentic expression to Dublin while simultaneously transforming the city into the poetic externalisation of a personal crisis that is far from nationally specific. Produced between Ireland and Brooklyn, and financed through crowd‐funding rather than the state‐supported Film Board, the film is cosmopolitan in the sense outlined by Ulrich Beck, who describes cosmopolitanism not as an ideal, but as an inescapable fact of contemporary life (Beck 2006). The film displays the intense ‘feeling for place’ which O’Tuama so strongly associates with Irish literary culture, yet at the same time expresses the difficulty of orientating ourselves in a world in which interconnectedness beyond our ability to conceptualise is a felt reality of everyday life. Out of Here acknowledges the fantasies of home and of escape through which we organise our spaces of habitation, and explores the conse‑ quences for identity when those comforting fictions begin to break down. As such, it offers a paradigmatic example of a cinema which has moved beyond a restrictive retelling of nation while still acknowledging the determining power of place.

References Augé, Marc (2009). Non‐Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich (2006). Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Eagleton, Terry (1988). Nationalism: irony and commitment. In: Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (ed. Seamus Deane), 23–42. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gillespie, Michael Patrick (2008). The Myth of an Irish Cinema: Approaching Irish‐Themed Films. New York: Syracuse University Press. Ging, Debbie (2008). Goldfish memories? On seeing and hearing marginalised identities in  contemporary Irish cinema. In: Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (ed. Borbála Faragó and Moynagh Sullivan), 182–203. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Harrower, Natalie (2007). Cityscapes of fluid desire: queering the romantic comedy in Liz Gill’s Goldfish Memory. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 217–230. London: Routledge. Higson, Andrew (1989). The concept of national cinema. Screen 30 (4): 36–47. doi:10.1093/ screen/30.4.36. Holohan, Conn (2009). Queering the green: the limitations of sexuality as metaphor in contemporary Irish cinema. In: Cinemas of Ireland (ed. Isabelle le Corff and Estelle Epinoux), 137–145. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Holohan, Conn (2010). Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Cinema. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. (trans. Donald Nicholson‐Smith). Oxford: Blackwell. Lincoln, Colm (1993). City of culture: Dublin and the discovery of urban heritage. In: Tourism in Ireland (ed. Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin), 203–230. Cork: Cork University Press. Lury, Karen and Massey, Doreen (1999). Making connections. Screen 40 (3): 229–238. doi:10.1093/screen/40.3.229. MacLeod, Allison (2014). Compartmentalized cosmopolitans: constructions of urban space in Irish queer cinema. In: Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales (ed. Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy), 42–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macnab, G (2001). ‘About Adam’ (review). Sight and Sound 11 (5): 38. Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage. McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI. McLoone, Martin (2007). Cinema, city and the imaginative space: “hip hedonism” and recent Irish cinema. In: Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (ed. Brian McIlroy), 205–216. London: Routledge. Negra, Diane (2010). Urban space, luxury retailing and the new Irishness. Cultural Studies 24 (6): 836–853. doi:10.1080/09502386.2010.502732. O’Tuama, Sean (1995). Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage. Cork: Cork University Press. Pettitt, Lance (1997). Pigs and provos, prostitutes and prejudice: gay representation in Irish film, 1984–1995. In: Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (ed. Eibhear Walshe), 252–284. Cork: Cork University Press. Pettitt, Lance (2000). Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rockett, Kevin (2001). (Mis‐)Representing the Irish urban landscape. In: Cinema and the City (ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice), 217–228. Oxford: Blackwell. Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke, and Hill, John (1988). Cinema and Ireland. London: Routledge. Sheeran, Patrick (1988). Genius fabulae: the Irish sense of place. Irish University Review 18 (2): 191–206. Warf, Barney and Arias, Santa (2009). Introduction: the reinsertion of space into the social sciences and humanities. In: The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias), 1–10. New York: Routledge.

23

The Proletariat and British Cinema Paul Dave

Introduction The issue of class in the field of British film studies has often had an uncertain and contentious presence as a focus for theory and criticism. The aim in this chapter therefore will be to outline some of the key elements of the classical Marxist ­theorisation of class and then to demonstrate the value of an approach informed by this theorisation to the representation of class in two recent British science fiction films, namely, Moon (2009) and Under the Skin (2014). This approach is indisputably a neglected one within the discipline. Equally, when the association of class and Marxism is made, and particularly when the subject matter to be investigated is the working class, the focus of study is often contained within the generic framework of social realism. For this reason, I will seek to demonstrate the usefulness of the Marxist perspective adopted here by drawing on examples of a popular genre where the cultural mediation of key contemporary issues raised by the fate of the working class are perhaps less apparent than they are in the latter’s conventional home of British social realism. While the focus of the piece is theoretically quite tightly circumscribed, I nevertheless hope to suggest the more general relevance of my approach to the representation of class both within the field of British film studies and as a means of linking the interpretation of film to wider political issues such as those associated with what I am referring to as the problem of the proletariat. This problem involves judging the claim that the classical Marxist conception of the proletariat has been historically surpassed, not just from the hostile perspective of neoliberal mythologies of classlessness but also from the more sympathetic, but nevertheless critical, post‐Marxisms where the proletariat is thought to have definitively ­ A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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metamorphosed in response to developments in neoliberal capitalism. As is well known, that classical Marxist conception of the proletariat holds that the latter occupies a position within society which brings it into increasing conflict with the capitalist system and that therefore it possesses the political potential to end that system. However, before attempting to demonstrate how these films help us to think about the contemporary problem of the proletariat, it might be worthwhile reflecting on how the issue of the generic affiliation of Moon and Under the Skin raises some interesting questions concerning the cultural and industrial aspects of contemporary British cinema in relationship to the Hollywood mainstream. While the science fiction genre has largely had a minor presence in the history of British cinema, the contemporary critical success and commercial viability of films such as Moon and Under the Skin reflect significant developments in the industry. As examples of what has been called ‘conceptual science fiction’ filmmaking – see also the recent Ex Machina (2015) and the British‐American production Coherence (2013) – these films, with their relatively modest budgets, their emphasis on ideas rather than spectacular effects, their connection to American distributors, their use of British production facilities or talent, and their association with auteur‐style art house thematics, represent an important example of the terms upon which contemporary British cinema has attempted to establish an industrially advantageous relationship with the might of Hollywood (Romney 2015). Accordingly, such films can help us to reflect on debates concerning the appropriate positioning of the national cinema vis‐à‐vis Hollywood. Simply put, Moon and Under the Skin represent a particular resolution of the opposition between ‘culturally’ and ‘industrially’ national filmmaking, one calibrated through an attention to scale of production and aesthetic ambition expressed in a self‐conscious relation between form and content. We could say that in such films the ideas are big whereas the production itself remains modest to small and that by implied contrast Hollywood deals in big productions with small ideas. At the same time, the chosen generic vehicle for these British films, despite the complex ideas carried within them, offers the commercial attractiveness of a form which retains all the glamorous resonance of contemporary Hollywood at its most grandiose (the sci‐fi blockbuster). This sophisticated, self‐flattering accommodation represents a creative and economic strategy which seeks to avoid some of the legendary historic pitfalls of the British industry’s relationship to Hollywood, particularly the temptation to aspire to bigness in terms of scale of production, ruinously pursued in the hope of mounting some form of competition in Hollywood’s home market. It is a strategy that has certainly acquired a distinctive presence not just within the industry itself, but also in film policy and in critical commentary on contemporary developments in the national cinema. Its message is of the necessity for a certain kind of canny compliance, one that fits with the global machinery of Hollywood. It is a message, in other words, of advantageous co‐habitation rather than competition or the



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pursuit of radical difference. As such, it is also a call, one might argue, for a national cinema appropriate to an era hegemonised by the spirit of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009). Under the Skin and Moon, with their delicate balance of art house signatures and popular generic vehicles, along with their complex industrial links, are products then of that view of the national film culture which has argued for the general importance of a strong base of ‘industrial’ British filmmaking – that is to say, filmmaking which is not culturally British in the sense of explicitly engaging with ‘British subject matter, characters and stories’, but rather that seeks to draw on UK ‘production and post‐production resources, locations and personnel’ (Higson 2010, p. 6). If these films are from one perspective only tenuously ‘culturally’ British, or weakly nationally ‘specific’, nevertheless, they do represent a clear engagement, on the part of the British industry, with a strategy of product differentiation which relies on exploiting a productive relationship between popular genres and the forms and styles of art house cinema (Hill 1992). Their art house signatures are perhaps most noticeable in the discourse of universalism which characterises their existential dramas of human identity and meaning – the source we might say of their philosophical ‘bigness’. For some, however, such evacuations of national and socio‐historical particulars risk the danger of a loss of cultural immediacy and relevance, and it is certainly true that Marxists have been concerned with the bleaching out of national and local cultural specificity within cinemas struggling under the influence and power of the global reach of Hollywood. A good example of such concerns may be seen in Mike Wayne’s account of the exploitation of ‘northernness’ in the comic inflections of British social realist films in the 1990s, including hits such as the Fox Searchlight production The Full Monty (1997) (Wayne 2006). Nevertheless, it is also true that, with the oppressive globalisation of capitalism, local stories are fast becoming, with all the adjustments of cultural specificity, recognisably and ­simultaneously depressingly global ones. To a certain extent, arguments phrased in terms of an opposition between cultural specificity and industrial necessity have become less urgent in the field of British film studies since the late 1990s. It might be argued that this change is a response to the consolidation of a position within policy discourses since the late 1990s which has minimised this opposition through an emphasis on what all ­f ilmmaking supposedly shares – the ‘creativity’ of the ‘cultural and creative industries’ – and through an endorsement of the argument for the necessity of national film industries to accommodate themselves to the mainstream, commercial industry, indeed, to make themselves attractive to Hollywood precisely in order to construct a thriving national base out of which forms of nationally specific work might then be supported. Thus, Andrew Higson’s recent account of British cinema, while retaining a clear recognition of an analytical opposition between ‘industrially’ and ‘culturally’ British film, remains sanguine about the frequent practical

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blurring of this opposition and about the contemporary health of the national cinema (especially under the stewardship of the UK Film Council), particularly so when measured against what he sees as its lowest point, the early Thatcherite 1980s (Higson 2010). Others, including myself, have argued that such accounts of success need to be challenged if the national film culture is to live up to the high ideals of cultural and social importance that continue to be ascribed to it in the contemporary moment (Newsinger 2012; Dave 2016). Despite such arguments, which bear closely on issues concerning the development of local and national production cultures, and despite the problematic status of a film such as Under the Skin as an example of an adaptation of a far more challenging literary text, it remains crucial to remember the necessarily complex dialectical nature of Marxist cultural analysis. In other words, regardless of the strong ideologies of class and capitalism reproduced in Under the Skin, the latter, like all mass cultural texts, retains, however diluted, utopian energies that form an inextricable part of its very ideological power ( Jameson 1993).

Thinking About Class as Identity and Relationship In any given era, a charged, conflictual, and changing set of class identities forms around the capitalist mode of production’s structurally defining class relationship, that is to say, the relationship that is maintained between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. This key relationship is based on bourgeois ownership of and proletariat dispossession from the means of production and on that associated process of ongoing exploitation whereby a social surplus (profit) is pumped out of the producers in excess of their wages and retained by the bourgeoisie. Of course, the class identities that shadow this core social relationship of capitalism need to be viewed not just in terms of exploitation but also as forms of inequality, discrimination, and oppression which intersect as ‘social and natural differentials’ with capitalist priorities of profit accumulation and market competition (Wayne 2003, p. 36). In this way, gender, race, ethnicity, generation, but also ­stigmatised modes of being, such as unemployment and migrancy, become markers of specific class identities within the larger unity of the proletariat. Thus, class under capitalism must always be approached in terms of the conjunction of its fundamental characteristic social relationship (the exploitative generative core) and the specific identities that mark relations of power operating within the social formation. The danger of restricting an analysis of class to identity is considerable. To focus ­exclusively on the fraught political and cultural articulation of such identities is to necessarily emphasise historical discontinuity in class experience to the exclusion of those experiences indicative of historical continuity. The recurrent pronouncement of the death of class is premised on exactly this sense of the vivid immediacy of succeeding class identities. For instance, take the differences between the class identities



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fashioned in the industrial moment with those of the post‐industrial one. Such ­indelibly marked historical contrasts can deflect attention away from the more abstract social relationship of exploitation whose long‐term historical dynamic remains largely consistent and is indeed intensifying under neoliberalism. Since the financial collapse of 2008, and after a long period of neglect, class as an issue has begun to re‐emerge within cognate disciplines to film studies, such as cultural studies (Nunn and Biressi 2013; Tyler 2013). Often, however, the emphasis has mainly been on cultural and political factors shaping contemporary class ­identities in a distinctively neoliberal moment. Some of this work is useful – and it will be drawn on here. However, it suffers from its predominant attention to class as an experience of oppression and domination – the power thematic which animates the discussion of classed identity and which often operates in terms of metaphors of inclusion/exclusion. What then gets neglected is the dynamic of exploitation which, given its fundamental nature, is capable of working beneath the surface of classed identities establishing a commonality which, although without any necessary political significance, nevertheless has enormous potential political ­significance. This is something I will return to later in the analysis of Moon.

British Film Studies and Class A Marxist approach to the representation in film of the dynamic of class outlined above has only a minor presence in British film studies (Wayne 2002; Dave 2006). Indeed, Marxist approaches are increasingly conspicuous, in this era of capitalist crisis, by the embarrassment of their absence. There is not the space here to speculate on why this is, but certainly one avenue to explore might lie in the hypothesis that the historically early development of capitalist social relations in England produced the emergence of what historians have called a ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ which is still very much operative (Wood 1991). This culture, while certainly ­preoccupied with class, remains allergically disinclined to put class and capitalism together. It is a culture, therefore, that tends to focus exclusively on class identity and status classifications. Neoliberal ideologies of class concentrated in figures such as the ‘chav’, the traveller, the asylum seeker, and the immigrant, along with the associated gallery of grotesques offered up through the idea of the ‘underclass’ might therefore be seen as an extension of a venerable English tradition. British film studies has offered many richly textured accounts of the representation of the English class system, that great taxonomy of classed identities (Durgnat 1970; Barr 1977). However, it has been less concerned with exploring class as a dynamic social relationship sitting at the heart of a historically distinctive ‘culture of capitalism’. To that extent, British film studies has faithfully reflected the symptomatic blind spot of British culture.

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Also, it is striking that generally the issue of class in the evaluation of British film culture has frequently been negative. Often the influence of a distinctive British class culture has been seen as responsible for holding back the national cinema. Thus, for some, the British cinema of the postwar period was judged to  have been left behind not just by the energetic popular cultural mediation of the experience of modernity offered by Hollywood, but also by the modernist art house sublation of Hollywood occurring in Europe. Auteurism and cinephilia married Hollywood and European cinema in a relationship of mutual ­appreciation, implicitly rebuking the national embarrassment of a ‘class‐bound’ ‘provincial’ British cinema (Dupin 2014). After the political and cultural e­ xcitement of 1968, the social‐realist tradition, conventionally viewed as British cinema’s signal achievement, and closely related to the representation of working‐class lives, was viewed with equal ambivalence within academic film studies. Accused of being formally deficient, lacking aesthetic self‐consciousness, and betraying a related cultural political naïvety, the earnest realist efforts and diluted modernism of the Northern New Wave moment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, seemed negligible when viewed from the perspective of the modernist experimentalism championed by the influential journal Screen. The mini‐boom in British film studies (post‐1980) had to wait for the discovery of a way around the aesthetic and political problem of realism – a problem intimately intertwined, it was felt, with a preoccupation with class. This boom was fuelled by the engagement with a British cinema of popular genres and neglected auteurs. Gender politics was key to this revisionist re‐habilitation and it was a moment when the study of British cinema aligned itself with postmodern positions in which class politics, historical materialism, and realism were all sidelined. And while by the late 1990s it was apparent that simple reversals of aesthetic and political hierarchies were in themselves inadequate, the relatively diminished interest in class analysis in British film has remained largely intact. A Marxist approach to British film is necessarily one in which class will be central. However, it is also one in which issues of form are certainly not prescribed according to any epistemological or political privileging of a narrow realism, or one in which the thematic focus is restricted to discussions of a limited class landscape placing exclusive emphasis on just the working class, or indeed historically specific cultural formations of the working class – Fordist and masculinist, for instance.

The Contemporary Problem of the Proletariat Before we explore the interrelated dynamic of class as identity and relationship in Moon and Under the Skin, we need to further open up the problem of the proletariat. A useful summary of the stakes of recent theoretical debates on the politics of class has been given by Daniel Zamora (Zamora 2014). He argues that there has



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been a debilitating convergence of the political left and right around the idea of de‐proletarianisation. The latter is understood to have resulted from the neoliberal move away from the social democratic goal of full employment. For the right, deepening unemployment and precarious employment have been displaced from the responsibility of state or capital onto the issue of the fitness of labour. For the left, the preferred discourses are of human waste, socio‐economic precarity, and ‘exclusion’. While these involve significantly different emphases, what both positions often share is a belief that this process captures a conclusive, even terminal, historical judgement on the proletariat as conceived in classical Marxism, in terms of its centrality and availability for progressive political agency under capitalism. Naturally, apologists for capitalism have never claimed to truly believe in any such proletarian political agency, even if the political potential of the proletariat has always preoccupied them and continues now to do so. For the left, however, such a conclusion not only represents a political loss of faith in the idea of the historic role of the proletariat mapped out by Marx, but also a displacement of attention away from capitalist exploitation, which is at the heart of Marx’s conception of the relationship of labour and capital, and a refocusing on a logic of ‘exclusion’ (or ‘inequality’) with its associated states of discrimination, abjection, domination, and stigmatisation. For Zamora, then, unemployed ‘surplus populations’, whose ragged, marked existence moves, symbolically, into the centre of the frame under neoliberalism, are either viewed, opportunistically on the right, as a problem to be moralised and targeted through new forms of policy such as workfare, or on the left as a signpost suggesting post‐Marxist solutions to the political problem of the exhausted potential of the classical proletariat. Thus, Zamora constructs a genealogy of the critique of the classical Marxist proletariat stretching back to Herbert Marcuse, Eldridge Cleaver, and André Gorz, up to Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, Nancy Fraser, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou. What these figures have in common is a belief that the loss of a stable, relatively socially homogeneous industrial proletariat and its fragmentation into an unstable, precariously surviving heterogeneous social body represents the historical necessity of a reinvention of the political project signified by classical Marxism. And one can understand the logic of this argument when one sees something like it playing out since the 1990s within, for instance, British cinema’s social‐realist output, where often compulsively nostalgic, residual representations of the northern, male industrial working class have co‐existed alongside a more unfamiliar working‐class landscape featuring the unemployed, children, women, immigrants. Compare Brassed Off (1996) to Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013). However, this division between the classical proletariat, conceived in a restricted, twentieth‐century industrial mode, and varieties of the ‘excluded’ has led to an over‐emphasis on immediate status divisions within the proletariat, and a neglect of Marx’s insistence on maintaining a conceptual grasp on the abstract, systemic logic of capitalism which produces the fundamental class difference, that of capital and labour. As Michael Denning argues, the key point in the formation of the

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proletariat is dispossession (and not insecurity or precarity): ‘For capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living. Dispossession or expropriation … such is the idyll of “free labour”’ (Denning 2010, p. 80). And: Unemployment precedes employment, and informal economy precedes the formal, both historically and conceptually. We must insist that ‘proletarian’ is not a synonym for ‘wage labour’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market. You don’t need a job to be a proletarian: wageless life, not wage labour is the starting point in understanding the free market. (Denning 2010, p. 81)

It is true that Marx himself swerved into a moralised political discourse at times, for instance, in his comments on the lumpenproletariat, which helped to establish the impression that for him the proletariat had an essential (waged) identity (Marx 2002, p. 63). As a reaction against this essentialised move, post‐Marxism rightly switches attention to the political process of class formation itself, a process whose urgency seems only greater in the neoliberal moment when older class certainties and identities are visibly disintegrating. However, this refocusing comes at a price if it neglects the more abstract, but nevertheless determining, systemic pressure of capitalism and obscures the fundamental historical continuities of the relationship of capital and labour in which the divisions between employed/unemployed are less significant. The danger then lies in an exclusive attention to the stark historical novelties of the vicious political discourses of neoliberalism in which the proletariat has been divided up, with ‘welfare dependency’, for instance, becoming a pivot on which intra‐class conflict can be ideologically fomented. Similar arguments have been made by Bryan D. Palmer, John Bellamy Foster and R. Jamil Jona (Palmer 2014; Jonna and Foster 2016). The more totalising and abstract analysis expressed in Marx’s comments on the relationship of working to reserve/surplus populations has recently been returned to by Fredric Jameson ( Jameson 2011, p. 147). Crucial here is the Grundrisse which establishes a key link between the freedom and virtual pauperdom of the worker: ‘it is already contained in the concept of free labour that he is a pauper: virtual pauper’ (Marx 1993, p. 604). Marx’s argument is that capitalism imposes on labour a fluctuating rhythm in which workers are drawn into employment and pushed out according to the systemic stresses and crises within strategies of capitalist competition and accumulation. As Jameson points out, such a dynamic in its contemporary guise is clearest when viewed from a global perspective ( Jameson 2010, pp. 565–582). Although there is not the space here to consider this in any detail, it is the logic described by Marx under the ‘general law of accumulation’ (Marx 1976, pp. 762–870). Unemployment is part of a single process of capital accumulation, an inextricable aspect of capitalist exploitation. That is to say, capitalism is dependent on a reserve army to offset wage rises and thus it actively produces surplus populations. Unemployment, as Jameson puts it, needs to be viewed as



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an  aspect of exploitation, however counterintuitive this seems ( Jameson 2011, pp. 150–151). As Zamora cautions, however, this is not to say that the ‘proletariat is a pauper’ – this would be to ignore a significant material difference between the two. Nevertheless, the dialectical refusal, on an abstract level, of the division ­between employed and unemployed does help to open up a critical sense of the necessary commonality of dispossession, precarity, compulsion, and self/ collective thwarting that capitalist social relations inflict on the proletariat  –  a critical sense  which Marx himself saw as of the greatest political significance (Marx 1976, p. 793).

Science Fiction and the Problem of the Proletariat These theoretical arguments can be used to frame the representation of the proletariat in Moon and Under the Skin, and to follow the ways in which the complex dialectic of class identity and class relationship plays out in both films. In Moon, a global corporation, Lunar Energies, mines ‘clean’ energy on the moon. Labour is provided by clones and robots. The clones are unaware that they are clones and that their lifespan is identical to their working life (measured as a three‐year contract). They believe that at the end of these contracts they will return to Earth. Instead, Lunar Energies atomises their exhausted bodies and animates a replacement. A single clone is able to supervise the entire base and the resulting isolation of this clone from its serial replacements is critical in maintaining their quiescence. Sam (Sam Rockwell), who is at the end of his contract and who expects to return home imminently, has an accident which necessitates the waking of a replacement. The two Sams meet, realise they are clones, not originals, and decide with the help of the base robot to escape. The dying Sam assists the freshly woken Sam to travel to Earth where the latter campaigns against the activities of Lunar Industries. Moon then is concerned with the arduous discovery of class as a relationship rooted in exploitation, but this discovery is only made possible by the dismantling of intra‐class identities. The problem of contemporary class dis‐identification, tracked by sociologists such as Tracy Shildrick and Rob MacDonald, alerts us to how neoliberal ideologies of class help to sustain and reproduce divisions within the proletariat, disabling ‘solidaristic forms of working class life’ (Shildrick and MacDonald 2013). Only by overcoming such intra‐class antagonisms, organised around stigmatised terms such as ‘poverty’ and ‘the unemployed’, can a sense of the connectedness of the widest ranges of proletarian existence, stretching from worker to abjected surplus, hope to be established. Marx’s breakdown of capitalism’s ‘relative surplus population’ or ‘industrial reserve army’ into the categories of the ‘floating’ (irregularly employed), ‘latent’ (to be called on when necessary),

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‘stagnant’ (extremely irregular casualised, precarious employment), and, finally, the ‘lowest sediment’ of pauperdom seems relevant here (Marx 1976, pp. 794–797). If the limitless supply of frozen clone replacements is a figuration of the reserve army, Sam 1 passes out of the active army, into a condition of pauperdom, while Sam 2 moves from a state of reserve army latency into the active army. The device of the clone then offers a condensed image of the life‐cycle of the proletariat under capitalism as precisely an integral process, rather than hypostatising the moments or different ‘states’ of that process. At the end of his contract, Sam 1 has passed into pauperdom as ‘one of those people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life‐span’ (Marx 1976, p. 797). Marx talks of pauperism as the ‘hospital of the active labour army’ as the care of the pauper is borne by those working (this is in effect Sam 2’s relationship to Sam 1) (Marx 1976, p. 797). For Marx, these categories are linked to the necessities of capitalist accumulation. However, from an ideological perspective, they become divisive class identities (‘respectable’, ‘unrespectable’, ‘underclass’, ‘chav’, and so on). It is the questioning of such boundaries that helps to create the kind of political charge Marx argued might accompany the proletariat’s overcoming of the division between its working and surplus parts. Moon demonstrates that a sense of the unity of the proletariat is graspable, but only if the relationship of exploitation between the proletariat and capital is given its due analytical and political priority. The film locates the political difficulty of this moment within the tortured consciousness of the clone. And this, in turn, raises the issue of the problem of identity in its starkest terms. Thus, what Sam 1 has to surrender is his own sense of irreducible difference (along with his ‘family’ whose televisual images he reviews and whose presence he longs for). Identity for Sam is a fiction owned by someone else (the original Sam and Lunar Industries). A hidden, foundational dispossession has to be accessed before he can make sense of his existence and hope for some form of liberation. The dilemma of the clone then demonstrates the way that class identity can obscure class relationships. The clone’s helplessness, clinging onto its identity but subject to a logic of dispossession and exploitation that cancels that identity, takes us to the core capitalist concept of labour market ‘freedom’ which in turn raises the ideological problem of the relationship of freedom and identity. As a clone, Sam 1 is only apparently free to enter and leave a contractual relationship with capital. This concealed unfreedom of the clone then draws attention to the ­actuality of the ‘normal’ exploitation of putatively free labour. As Denning argues, such freedom conceals prior dispossession and the coercion of necessity. For Marx, freedom for labour under capitalism is also the freedom to starve if the ‘choice’ not to choose such labour is asserted, and it is this problem (of an empty choice) that makes such freedom an ideological fiction. The clones’ experience of dispossession is the riddle at the very heart of their identity, but this thing they share, a radical similarity, confronts them as a nightmare of self‐cancellation. Narrated and stylistically conveyed as the ­ subjective experience of psychic collapse, the film thereby suggests the enormity



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of the struggle that is necessary if Sam 1 is to release himself from his identities (as ‘Sam’, ‘free worker’, ‘father’, and ‘husband’). We see this struggle most clearly in the scenes in which Sam 1 slips into forms of hopeless mimetic rivalry with Sam 2. The two clones compete for a claim to the same identity which neither own. For instance, the impossible symmetries of the ping‐pong game suggest this futile disavowal of their similar position. The key shift then upon which the narrative turns, the moment of anagnorisis – which is not left to the last because the film wants to explore the political energies released by this moment of recognition – occurs when the dying Sam refocuses on the relationship in which he is caught with Lunar Industries, rather than on who he thinks he is ( Jameson 2009, pp. 565–582). Here the film guides us towards understanding class as what people own (or do not own), as opposed to class understood as what people are (the identity problematic). If the ideologies of the neoliberal order are structured around the latter, then it is the occulted question of the former which is nevertheless politically crucial for the proletariat. Thus, when Sam 1 painfully gives up his presumed identity, this paradoxically enables a ­potentially productive field of real differences among the two clones to emerge. They develop a single plan in which their different roles combine in terms of political effectiveness. A fighting and liberated difference depends on the understanding of a radical similarity whose initial appearance is desolating. As Sam 1’s physical state deteriorates, he begins to resemble less the self‐ contained, self‐reliant figure of contract labour, and more Marx’s abject, ruined, huddled pauper. It is noticeable how the mise‐en‐scène pays particular attention to a deterioration of his skin as well as depicting his increasing encasement in various protective layers – in a strange imitation of the vagrant or homeless – while his replacement’s decisive freshness and physical alertness are given a contrasting emphasis. In this way, through the lifecycle of the clone, the film evokes the contemporary political unconscious of neoliberalism: surplus populations are, as Marx put it, as if ‘bred’ by capitalism itself and therefore proletarian misery is its systemic result rather than dysfunctional feature (Marx 1976, p. 784) (Figure 23.1). Finally, it is interesting that Sam 2’s arrival on Earth, although not visualised, only registered on the soundtrack, leads to public discussion of Lunar Industries in the mass media. We hear Sam 2 being referred to on a radio talk show as an ‘illegal immigrant’. This reminds us of how right‐wing neoliberal political discourses depend on the ideological underscoring of these divisive intra‐class identities within the body of the global proletariat, producing what Imogen Tyler refers to as the fabrication of national ‘abjects’ (Tyler 2013). Moon presents an unfamiliar image of the proletariat which is politically potent, complex, and ‘open’, but nevertheless one not requiring conceptual distancing from its classical Marxist elaboration. In the book Under the Skin (2000) by Michael Faber from which Jonathan Glazer’s film is adapted, Moon’s intra‐class unity in adversity or radical similarity – what we might call the state of proletarian under‐ the skinness – is blocked despite the irony that in this book a pressing sense of a

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Figure 23.1  The political unconscious of neoliberalism: Moon (2009).

common experience of exploitation unifies a wide range of diverse creatures. By contrast, in the film, we see revealed the impossibility of any inter‐class under the skinness in an increasingly polarising neoliberal socio‐economic system with its new class ontologies. The book is a raw satire on capitalist factory farming transposed into an alien abduction narrative which sets up correspondences between its many victims: animals, humans, women, aliens, the working class. In the film much of this disappears. An alien (Scarlet Johansson), disguised as a van‐driving seductress, abducts young working‐class Glaswegian men until she meets a disfigured, lonely man who appears to interrupt her obscure mission. The distracted alien escapes from her alien assistant and hides in the wilderness, encountering there a logger who in attempting to rape her discovers her alien skin beneath her human one. The logger then kills her. Glazer’s adaptation has a complex relationship to the science fiction genre. As Jameson argues, the latter is related to the utopianism which seeks to imagine what, under neoliberal regimes has become seemingly impossible: the advent of historic change ( Jameson 2005). In a world of globalised capitalism, the utopian vocation (for instance, to envision the end of capitalism) appears stalled. Glazer’s film seems to want to tap into the utopianism which inhabits science fiction’s desire for radical alterity, or rather its determined pursuit of what is qualitatively different from what we experience in the here and now. We can see this most clearly in Glazer’s fascination with the formal and stylistic problem of imagining the perspective of alien otherness. In terms of representational strategies, this produces a disjunctive formal structure bringing the ‘surreal and very concretely real’ together in order to create a pervasive sense of defamiliarisation (Romney 2014, p. 24). This effect is associated with the use of non‐figurative, ­narratively enigmatic visual spectacle, featuring the alien in spaces of ‘pure black



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or white, of indeterminate dimension’ as opposed to the sequences shot with a naturalistic, surveillance cinema or reality television aesthetic as in the scenes featuring the alien abductions (Romney 2014, p. 24). (Crucially, the male ­victims were randomly selected individuals who were unaware they were being filmed – I will return to this important point shortly.) Ultimately, Glazer’s commitment to intensifying our sense of the representational challenge of this alien dimension in the film leads him to go so far as distancing himself from the c­ oncluding ‘unzipping’ of the alien’s human skin to reveal the creature within. As he says: ‘The closest you see of the alien … is an entirely black screen’ (Glazer, in Romney 2014, p. 27). Such an approach fits with Jameson’s argument that the strength of utopianism lies less in any literal representation of radical alternatives to the present and rather in the keeping alive of the ‘imperative to imagine them’ and that this effort often manifests itself in formal strains ( Jameson 2005, p. 416). Thus, it is that in attempting to imagine the future, science fiction can lapse into the spectacle of bathetic otherness in which that conjured future appears as a poorly disguised present. As Glazer puts it, this is science fiction as ‘spaceships and weapons and helmets and lights’ (Glazer, in Romney 2014, p. 26). Despite Under the Skin’s earnest ‘art house’ striving after a vision of alterity, the film tends to lose its connection to the utopian charge. Certainly, however, one can see how the juxtaposition of naturalism and an abstract surrealism operates as a defamiliarisation technique which might then be linked to the utopian desire to hold fast to the vision of the strangeness and possible mutability of the everyday. Indeed, Jonathan Romney refers to the influence of the British 1980s poetic of Martianism (Craig Raine) on the shots of Glasgow, along with Glazer’s re‐contextualisation of the Hollywood star ( Johansson), who is seemingly not recognised in her everyday disguise outside the Hollywood glamour framework (Romney 2014, p. 26). However, other ways of explaining the film’s formal and stylistic peculiarities press their claims when we consider its relation to the source novel. Glazer’s script changes were extreme. Intriguingly, what was excised was precisely the agency that works in the book to nullify the sense of alterity nominally aimed at by Glazer in the film. That is to say, the radical and sickeningly homogenising re‐familiarising force in Faber’s dystopian novel is … capitalism. Indeed, in order to develop this effect Faber deliberately exploits the representational dilemma of science fiction: imagining the new/unknown solely within the terms of the old/known. Faber constantly shows how the unknown reveals itself as the well‐known. Thus, the named heroine, Isserley, is an alien proletarian whose role as abductress of humans produces a luxury commodity (edible human delicatessen) for a cosmic capitalist order whose visible expression is provided by a celebrity plutocrat. In other words, the book gives us a black satire of neoliberalism which uses a collapsed science fictional scenario, projecting the nightmare of contemporary capitalist exploitation out into the universe. Paradoxically, this satirical dystopianism remains more faithful to the utopian desire for change than is managed in the film. Faber’s narrative

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persistently approaches the possibility of a challenge to the locked‐in roles and sequences of actions that the alien capitalist civilisation represents. This possibility is registered in Isserley’s distressed consciousness which is struggling with a disavowed perception of commonality or creatural solidarity among the many species of victim of this neoliberalism of the stars. Ultimately it is the fundamentally naturalised idea of capitalism and its exploitative relationships which she cannot question and that prevent her from crossing the boundaries separating out the various classes of the exploited she encounters. Capitalism for her is ‘Just … supply and demand’, an ‘eternal, inseparable pairing, like day and night, male and female’ (Faber 2000, p. 229). Along with this naturalised capitalism, it is identity, what she is, or, rather, what she has become through the surgery that changes her from desirable alien furry quadruped into the hairless, large‐breasted, biped required to seduce male humans, which obsesses her and constrains her political consciousness. Related to this, Isserley’s misery at her labour‐related metamorphosis offers a figure of the process whereby capitalist ideologies capture proletarian differences within abjectifying identitarian classifications. She experiences her alien co‐proletarians as ‘trash’ while at the same time almost spiritualising the sexual allure of the sleek capitalist class in the form of the plutocrat’s son. This aspect of Faber’s book, steeped in contemporary and intensifying class differences and distances, does have a presence in the formal and stylistic features of Glazer’s film. Sam Wigley notes, for instance, how the alien’s ‘perspective of total otherness’ creates a ‘hostile vantage point from which to view the mill and throng of contemporary Glasgow’, and he sees the film’s ‘narrow gaze’ as ‘tainted with ­cynicism, even disgust’ (Wigley 2014, p. 89). This combination of fascination and aversion, intensified by the contrast between the detached and abstracted alien ­perspective and a degraded human context, offers, according to Glazer, a ‘buzz’ and this can in turn be related to representational conventions established in a period characterised by neoliberal class polarisation (Glazer, in Romney 2014, p. 26). Such polarisation corresponds to a potent, historically distinctive loss of under‐the‐skinness. There is, in other words, a recognisable representational structure of class voyeurism from above – nothing new there – but one supercharged by the social abyss that is opening up under neoliberal socio‐economic regimes. Romney is perhaps skirting this perception when he remarks in his interview with Glazer that ‘there is something appropriate about the idea of a Hollywood star suddenly placed on Sauchiehall St and being an alien’ (Romney 2014, p. 27). In this respect it is important to recognise the impact Glazer’s clandestine filming has on the film’s representation of class. Through this method, working‐class males are framed as artless, concupiscent primitives (animals) and the codes of social realism acquire an anthropological detachment. Also, this class difference is supplemented by the traditional British class representational divide in which Scottishness represents some core working‐class atavism (a dirty ontology), while Englishness represents some bourgeois suavity, as activated here by Johansson’s adoption of what Romney calls the voice of a ‘posh bird’ (a clean ontology).



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So, we might say that Glazer unwittingly reproduces a perspective that is satirised in Faber’s book: a reified, deadly view of class which uncritically takes capitalism as its given. The under‐the‐skinness of the book’s title refers ultimately as much to capitalism’s annihilating identity logic (as Isserley says of her victims: ‘they’re all the same’), its destructive consumption of difference, as it does to creaturely solidarity. It is the former which frustrates the latter, the exterminating logic of exploitation and commodification which holds the characters helpless in their appointed class positions and relationships fostering logics of dis‐identification and abjection. And it is the capitulation to this view – one that evokes traditional class bestiaries – that produces the spectacle of the ‘mill and throng’ of working‐class Glaswegian males in the film’s abduction scenes. Furthermore, it is a gaze which is associated with a capitalist class, emblematised by the Hollywood star whose perspective has become so distanced to its reified, alienated environment that the idea of such a class inhabiting ‘another world’ becomes literalised – and this gives us a semantically richer explanation of the appropriateness of the alien/Hollywood metaphor used by Romney. The alien perspective then, so assiduously sought in  all  its purity by Glazer, is in this respect, a screen for recognisably polarised, ­neoliberal, class landscapes (Figure 23.2). There are afterimages of the proletarian Isserley persisting in Johansson’s alien impersonation. However, generally neither the latter’s de‐eroticised performance nor the disguise of cheap clothes the alien adopts affects this sense of the thrill of deep class contrasts. Thus, in the seemingly ineradicable glamour behind Johansson’s awkwardly stylised impersonation, the film paradoxically evokes not the fitful proletarian consciousness of Isserley but instead the carnal distress which she feels in the presence of the charismatic celebrity plutocrat. However, this

Figure 23.2  ’The alien perspective’: Under the Skin (2014).

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carnal distress is displaced in the film onto the concupiscent working‐class males who find themselves unaccountably, bewilderingly in the presence of a real ‘posh bird’. At the same time, Johansson’s alien, in the killing scenes, glides through a grimy, derelict and lonely urban space  –  the milieu of the ‘underclass’  –  whose association with the ‘revolting’ has become a pronounced feature of the representation of class under neoliberalism, as Tyler’s work reminds us (Tyler 2013). The film condenses this sense of the pollution of an abject world in its use of the pivotal character suffering from neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson). But this scene, of a consciously included figure (rather than a surreptitiously shot non‐ professional passer‐by) who then becomes a de facto actor, is inflected with class prejudice. That is to say, the character’s social isolation is presented as part of his local, intra‐class‐based rejection, whereas the alien turned anthropologist, in the form of wealthy Hollywood star Johansson, strokes the man’s disfigured face and hands curiously and tenderly. It is difficult not to see this scene in terms of the neoliberalism’s ideological investment in charity and the associated ethic of celebrity compassion as guiding responses to the fear and anxiety of a social which is no longer felt to be commonly shared, but is constituted out of separate class worlds and populated with different species of human who share little or nothing under the skin. In the book, the plutocrat’s son represents Boltanksi and Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). His libertarian posturing covers a traditionally savage capitalist logic of exploitation. Faber neatly skewers his ‘compassionate’ capitalist pose through Isserley’s proletarian scepticism. She well knows that even the best intentions of the capitalist class spell disaster for the proletariat, just as it is becoming increasingly apparent that philanthro‐capitalism is a trap and that we need protection from the likes of Bono, Geldof, Gates, and Zuckerberg. The generic complexity of Glazer’s Under the Skin then, its Martian mix of realism and surrealism, does not offer defamiliarisation in the sense of the liberation implied in making a familiar world strange. Rather these contrasting aesthetic strategies appear to confirm rather than ironise familiar neoliberal class ideologies, re‐energising them, giving us the working‐classness of the young Scottish ‘schemies’ as a traditional representation of class appetite and animality. In sum, as we have seen, outside a confrontation with the logic of capitalism’s exploitative class relationships, the ideologies of class identity remain tenaciously in place.

The Exhaustion of Marxist Hermeneutics? The Marxist theorisation of class and capitalism offered here has attempted to demonstrate its value by showing how these two films represent different but complementary meditations on the contemporary problem of the proletariat.



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What makes Moon interesting is the way its narrative puzzles away at the relationship between the foundational dispossession integral to class relationships under capitalism, on the one hand, and class experienced as identity, on the other. As a result of that tenacity, the film effects a distancing from the neoliberal ideologies of class and capitalism haplessly re‐confirmed in the process of Glazer’s adaptation of Faber’s novel. This kind of Marxist cultural analysis seeks to remain attuned to the dialectical charge at work in popular cultural texts. It holds that regardless of the presence of strong ideologies of class and capitalism in such texts, they retain utopian energies ( Jameson 1993). This is one reason why it is unfortunate that it has become fashionable to deprecate Marxist ideological critique as predictable, boring, or even unnecessary. It needs to be remembered that the dialectical method contains both hot and cold streams, a double hermeneutic, working both through the negativity of critique and the creative affirmation of possibilities glimpsed within the most problematic or degraded visions (Freedman 2002). This, I hope, has been evident in my interpretation of the films. Finally, and on a less defensive note, it is possible to open up this crisis of the ideological or symptomatic reading of cultural texts in ways which directly reflect on the themes and arguments of the chapter. As Carolyn Lesjak puts it, contemporary Marxist cultural criticism tends to find itself trapped in an undialectical polarisation aligning it with a putatively reductive interest in the ideological depths or content of the text against those critical procedures attuned to aesthetics/‘surface’/form (Lesjak 2013). This is an opposition she sees visibly hardening across the humanities. From a position sympathetic to Marxism, Lesjak’s commentary on these developments is interesting. She points out that they seem, on one level, determined by the ‘crisis’ of the humanities within the increasingly corporatized university (Lesjak 2013, p. 238). This context offers one explanation of nostalgic returns to the purity and distracting solace of the reified ‘text itself ’. Attention devoted to the latter’s formal and empirically reassuring complexity is a defensive – and hopelessly ineffective – reaction to the philistinism and cost‐benefit/audit mentality of those who are strategically in charge of the neoliberal Academy. However, it would be disingenuous not to recognise that Marxist cultural criticism does face serious challenges, not least because, as Lesjak points out, of its association with a now clearly discredited belief in some unproblematic relationship between ideology critique and political activism (Lesjak 2013. p. 271). That said, it remains important to historicise the problem of the political effectiveness of such reading strategies. As Lesjak argues, there is, in these contemporary rejections of Marxism, an unaddressed, ‘deeper’ pressure, one that has not, however, gone unnoticed by Marxist critics themselves. We have already named this pressure capitalist realism – the sense that neoliberalism passes itself off as the untranscendable horizon of all social forms. In response to this situation Žižek and Jameson point out that hegemonic neoliberalism has resulted in a mutation in the functioning of ideology relative to capitalism and in the very historical sense itself.

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Žižek describes this mutation as ideology switching from a classic symptomal model to a fetishistic model  –  as he puts it, this is the difference between ‘they know what they are doing (but they do it anyway)’ and the classic understanding of ideological demystification that holds ‘they don’t know what they are doing’ and which thereby carries a necessary implication that knowledge effectively enlightens (Lesjak 2013, p. 255). The fetishistic model, which is characteristic of what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘enlightened false consciousness’ or cynicism, describes a fundamentally altered relationship between knowing and doing/feeling/seeing (Sloterdijk 1988). Under capitalist realism, then, knowledge of the reality of the world is used, fetishistically, to allow us to carry on regardless. When knowledge gained no longer registers the full impact of reality, or responds to it in ways which leave that reality fundamentally unchanged, this clearly has unavoidable consequences for the process of interpretation as practised in Marxist cultural criticism. The commonsensical, everyday surfaces of a world of capitalist realism do not, after all, offer any immediately apparent interpretive problem when viewed from such a perspective. That things are bad, everyone knows. No one needs this pointing out. For Lesjak, this represents a challenge for Marxist cultural criticism which is met, for instance, in Jameson’s project of cognitive mapping, his spatial dialectic, in which the structures of the socio‐ economic relations of globalised capitalism are brought into collision with ‘lived experience’, thus allowing us to develop a different affective relationship to what we can know about this new reality of global capitalism. The reading of Moon offered here is located in this very convergence, with its emphasis on the tension maintained between limited, immediate, class identities and more abstract social relationships. Crucially, Jameson’s work demonstrates the degree to which the global system of capitalism is precisely not self‐evident in its operation. As Lesjak points out, it is often nevertheless the apparent self‐evident operation of the power relations of domination that is cited as a key reason for the waning significance of ideology critique. As an example, she cites critics whose assertion of the redundancy of the hermeneutic drive in Marxism is, they claim, clinched by the obscene spectacular obviousness of contemporary imperial domination and oppression (for instance, the images emerging from Abu Graib) (Lesjak 2013, p. 244). However, once again, Jameson’s dialectical criticism makes a key distinction here, one which has run throughout this chapter, between a focus on domination (power) and exploitation (capitalist socio‐economic relations). While the former may well be culturally over‐exposed, the latter is certainly not – and precisely because of this, it requires us to refine rather than abandon the interpretive project associated with Marxist cultural criticism. Furthermore, as Jameson puts it: ‘an emphasis on exploitation is a socialist program, while that of an emphasis on domination is a democratic one, a program and a language only too easily and often coopted by the capitalist state’ ( Jameson 2011). Lesjak is surely right when she argues that the protection of the



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humanities in the neoliberal storm, including film studies in whatever academic context it finds itself, can only be achieved not by retreat to enclaves and the revival of ideologies of the aesthetic, but by forms of criticism which express ‘a fidelity to revolution’ (Lesjak 2013, p. 264).

References Barr, Charles (1977). Ealing Studios. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Dave, Paul (2006). Visions of England: Class and Contemporary Culture. Oxford: Berg. Dave, Paul (2016). Film policy and England: the politics of creativity. In: The Routledge Companion to Film and Politics (ed. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy), 186–196. London: Routledge. Denning, Michael (2010). Wageless life. New Left Review 66 (November–December): 79–97. Dupin, Christophe. (2014). ‘Free cinema’. BFI Screenonline. Available at: www.screenonline. org.uk/film/id/444789/index.html (accessed 6 November 2014). Durgnat, Raymond (1970). A Mirror for England. London: Faber. Faber, Michael (2000). Under the Skin. London: Faber. Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books. Freedman, Carl (2002). The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity and the Politics of Culture. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Higson, Andrew (2010). Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, John (1992). The issue of national cinema and British film production. In: New Questions of British Cinema (ed. Duncan Petrie), 10–21. London: BFI. Jameson, Fredric (1993). Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric (2005). Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric (2009). Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric (2011). Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. London: Verso. Jonna, R Jamil and Foster, Bellamy John (2016). Marx’s theory of working class precariousness. Monthly Review 67 (11): 21–45. Lesjak, Carolyn (2013). Reading dialectically. Criticism 55 (2): 233–277. Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1993). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (2002). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In: Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’: Postmodern Interpretations (ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin). London: Pluto. Newsinger, Jack (2012). British film policy in an age of austerity. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (1): 133–142. Nunn, Heather and Biressi, Anita (2013). Class and Contemporary British Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Palmer, Bryan D. (2014). Reconsiderations of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianisation. Socialist Register 50: 40–62. Romney, Jonathan (2014). Unearthly stranger. Sight and Sound 24 (4): 22–27. Romney, Jonathan. (2015). ‘Inside your head: conceptual science fiction’. Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news‐opinion/sight‐sound‐magazine/features/inside‐your‐ head‐conceptual‐science‐fiction. (accessed 17 September 2015). Shildrick, Tracy and MacDonald, Rob (2013). Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame the poor. Sociological Review 61 (2): 286–303. Sloterdijk, Peter (1988). Critique of Cynical Reason. London: Verso. Tyler, Imogen (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Wayne, Mike (2002). The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders, Diasporas. Bristol: Intellect. Wayne, Mike (2003). Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends. London: Pluto. Wayne, Mike (2006). The performing northern working class in British cinema: cultural representation and its political economy. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (4): 287–297. Wigley, Sam (2014). Under the Skin. (Review). Sight and Sound 24 (4): 89. Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1991). The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. London: Verso. Zamora, Daniel. (2014). ‘When exclusion replaces exploitation: the condition of the surplus population under neoliberalism’. Available at: http://nonsite.org/ feature/when‐exclusion‐replaces‐exploitation (accessed 7 November 2014).

24

Race and Ethnicity in British Cinema Sarita Malik

Introduction From Flame in the Streets (1961) to Notting Hill (1999) to Belle (2013), British films have much to tell us about how ideologies of race and ethnicity are framed. Cinema reveals how social relations are developed, how different ‘racialised’ perspectives are served and how popular understandings of race and ethnicity are produced and contested. This chapter aims to highlight how the subject of ‘race, ethnicity, and cinema’ is an important example of how film culture, as well as being a barometer of social change, is also a significant example of the politics of representation. The discussion, loosely chronological, will illustrate how ‘race and ethnicity’ debates have related to British films since the 1980s. The first section considers how black British cultural‐political praxis in the 1980s, and its concern with ­diasporic articulations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation, exerted an influence upon British film theory and criticism. The second section identifies the shifting rhetorical value of black British cinema that coincided with the fragmentation of black British cinema practice and theory in the 1990s. It is suggested that this development arose partly as a result of an increasingly commercialised, transnational British‐Asian cinema practice, but also because of the decline of the black British political movement (Elliott‐Cooper 2013). The final section considers current British cinema practice and industrial politics, focusing on some recent black British productions. It is argued that British cinema discourse (for example, in the distribution sector and among policy‐makers) is currently invested with a particular ‘post‐racial’ nuance, but that this is articulated against signs of a discernibly anti‐racist political film culture. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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It seems important to discuss terminology from the outset, including how ‘race and ethnicity’ are being conceptualised here. Given its socially‐constructed character, the concept of ‘race’ refers to the social construction of ideas related to different ethnic and cultural groups and formations.1 Film analysis that has focused on themes of race and ethnicity has tended to converge around black British cinema. Many of the cinematic examples that might be categorised as ‘black’, either because of the director and/or producer’s ethnicity or because of the subject‐matter taken up in the film, have set in motion debates about the relationship between race and British cinema. It might be argued that these tendencies (which are, to an extent, reproduced in  this analysis) serve to reinscribe perceptions of ‘race’ as synonymous with ‘black’. But what this chapter also seeks to do is acknowledge that ‘race’ is a socially‐­constructed, ideological category that has been effectively used by various ­constituents to limit, negate, elucidate, and challenge understandings of difference in society. So ‘race and ethnicity’ carry certain values and ideological orientations in which producers, viewers, and critics (scholarly or otherwise) are all implicated according to specific structures of power and knowledge. These seemingly abstract concerns are relevant when we start to consider how ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and the specifically British conceptualisation of the term ‘black’ are operative in contemporary cinema in the UK. The term ‘race’ in the British cultural and political terrain has almost universally been associated with postcolonial diasporic communities (those of African, Caribbean, and South‐Asian descent) and those more recently categorised as BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic). On the one hand, there is a sense of a reductionist politics at work, because this implies that it is only those groups who inhabit a racially classifiable identity. On the other hand, Britain has had a unique relationship with these communities because of its colonial legacy; the British Empire was the largest in history with parts of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean comprising its  most important colonies. In postcolonial media culture, ethnic and racial ­consciousness has been a property of particular sorts of social relations, connecting issues of citizenship, value pluralism, and the role of community. A key point of contestation therefore begins to surface in how we start to think about race, ethnicity, and British cinema. Within the critical literature, it is clear that ‘race’ has been coupled with ‘black’, for example, in work that examines either representations/images of black racial difference or black British filmmaking more broadly. A preoccupation with non‐dominant, marginalised (black) groups has, in a sense, reproduced the ‘sense of oddness, differentness, exceptionality of these groups’ (Dyer 2000, p. 44). At the same time, it is precisely the critical debates around the national identity of British cinema, often led by black British critics and practitioners, that have usefully identified black British cinema as a key site through which the production of knowledge around race and ethnicity has emerged and been creatively organised. Taken together, these two points may seem antithetical, because they respectively critique and support an emphasis on ‘blackness’ in race



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and ethnicity British cinema debates. While ideas of ‘race and ethnicity’ are entirely socially‐constructed, and are certainly not reducible to ideas of ‘black representation’, it is the contention of this chapter that black British cinema (and the accompanying debates) have demonstrably opened up, captured, and been used as a space through which fundamental discursive contestations around race, identity, and nation have been usefully rehearsed. There are always other possibilities in how we start to approach the relationship between race, ethnicity, and British cinema. Studies of ‘whiteness’ and film, important as they have been for their emphasis on ‘race’ as a social and political construct and for their identification of ‘race’ as something not simply reserved for certain categories of people, have remained exceptions to the rule within film studies. Certainly, there is limited film scholarship on whiteness compared to studies of blackness. Richard Dyer (first in his 1988 Screen article and later in the 1997 book) has been one of the few film scholars to identify whiteness as a culturally‐­ constructed, ethnic category in mainstream film. Through an analysis of Jezebel (1938), Simba (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1969), he suggests that whiteness in these films is linked to notions of order, rationality, and rigidity in contrast with black disorder, irrationality, and looseness (Dyer 2000). The American feminist scholar, bell hooks, reminds us that postcolonial whiteness is rarely acknowledged as an ethnicity, identity, or viewing position (hooks 1990). In her ground‐breaking essay on Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (1987), she draws attention to what she identifies as the whiteness of the film, not just in terms of the (over‐)representations of skin colour on screen, but also whiteness as ‘a concept underlying racism, colonisation and cultural imperialism’ (hooks 1990, p. 166). Another outstanding concern is the Eurocentric basis of British film studies which is marked by the failure to invoke African, Caribbean, Asian, and Arabic thinkers and theorists in its critical framework. Race‐centred film criticism typically focuses on individual films and groups of films, rather than seeking to analyse cinema as a whole and its relationship to our racialised social world. Film theories of race and representation have centred on matters of textuality and content (for example, stereotyping and ideology) by analysing how films choose to select and present information on different (black) racial communities. What this highlights is that ‘race’ discourse – within and beyond the academy (film studies, popular film criticism, marketing)  –  commonly positions ‘race’ as an adjectival, descriptive quality, about ‘racial difference’ and particular communities, rather than about systemic patterns and practices of domination and exclusion. The dynamics at work in how culture, media representation, and race and racism operate in relation to cinema continues to be an important aspect of how we understand British cinema today. By exploring how such racialised power dynamics operate, there is the possibility of a wider influence on how we study and build knowledge around British cinema in general. The chapter will go on to bring together some of these ‘race’ debates within British film studies alongside a discussion of selected key film productions that have informed our understanding in this area. It is clear, even

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within the summative scope of the discussion presented here that, since the late 1970s, studies of black British cinema have been caught up in broader on‐going critical‐intellectual struggles for racial equality within Critical Race Studies.

Critical Race Film Studies – Black Film, British Cinema The 1980s was arguably the most exciting decade with regards to black British cinema, coupled with a deliberative form of critical race studies film criticism. This period remains the most comprehensively documented moment of black British cinema and one that succeeded in weaving together a film‐based and ­critical race response to broader processes of social change, racism, and power. Debates were led by those interested in examining the relationship between race (using black film as a trope of this) and the concept of national cinema (in this case, British cinema). The 1980s was a decade of political turbulence, with contestation over ‘race’ and national identity surfacing as a preoccupation of evolving forms of representation and with poststructuralist thinking on identity formation and aesthetic practice featuring as an important element of these discussions. While such approaches to thinking about race and difference might have been critiqued for being unnecessarily obscure, the version of critical race studies film criticism that emerged was actually motivated by quite practical concerns, involving an attempt to counter dominant mainstream representations of race and reduce racial inequalities in, for example, production, authorship, and agency. Within these debates, the cultural was explicitly located in relation to the socio‐political, ­demonstrating the political potential of film cultures and criticism While the 1980s witnessed a more systematic recognition of independent Black  British film, the tradition could be traced back to the 1960s, to the ­pioneering  –  albeit marginalised  –  work of directors such as Lionel Ngakane, Lloyd Reckord, and Horace Ové. The 1970s had seen the first black‐directed British Film Institute (BFI)‐funded feature, Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975) which, along with other black‐British themed films such as A Private Enterprise (Peter Smith, 1972) and Black Joy (Anthony Simmons, 1977), marked early attempts to recode and ‘answer back’ to what Jim Pines has called the ‘official race relations narrative’, which had so far dominated the history of black representation (Pines 1988, p. 29). The social‐realist aesthetic was employed here as a way of querying the (mis)representations of the past and shifting the focus of the drama from the centre to the margins. Many of the emergent discussions around ‘representation’ coincided with the growth of black and Asian‐British independent film workshop collectives. Debates around ‘third cinema’ as well as diasporic identity were considered in relation to questions of ‘race’, ethnicity, and their representation in the media. Isaac Julien



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and Kobena Mercer’s 1988 article in Screen, ‘De Margin and De Centre’, was particularly notable for kicking off a debate about what is deemed marginal and central in cultural practice, and according to whom. At the heart of their piece, that drew upon black British cinema as a case in point, was a critique of how film theory (exemplified by the Screen journal from whose pages they were now writing) ‘participated in a phase of British left culture that inadvertently marginalized race and ethnicity as a consequence of the centrifugal tendency of its “high theory”’ ( Julien and Mercer 1988, p. 7). As such, the Screen mode of discourse was being criticised for its exclusionary practices that were seen to have a direct impact on how issues of race and ethnicity – and by default, given its dominant association, the work of black British filmmakers – were being discursively managed. A range of black and Asian groups were generating (self‐)representational ­practices and an exciting theory/practice interface within multicultural c­ ontexts. In 1982, John Akomfrah co‐founded the Black Audio Film Collective, the most ­prolific of the independent film collectives that sought to combine oppositional practice with aesthetic concerns. He has described how black and Asian ­f ilmmakers found themselves discussing the rhetorical value of defining part of their identity according to these politicised frames of reference – such as ‘black British filmmaker’ – in order to open up those cultural spaces that had previously been closed (Akomfrah, in Malik 2010). Many of these filmmakers were now bypassing the dominant regimes of representing ‘race’ and seeking to form a new i­dentity politics around issues of migration, colonisation, displacement, and marginalisation. There was a new emphasis on syncretism rather than integration, on fluidity rather than fixity, and on the processes generating differentiation as much as the differences themselves. The updated versions of black independent film production in the 1980s were not, however, just confined to the workshops, although this was the most overtly political space for black film production. The grant‐aided or subsidised workshop sector tended to make experimental, micro‐budget, documentaries and the occasional feature such as Majdhar (Ahmed A. Jamal, Retake, 1984) and The Passion of Remembrance (Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, Sankofa, 1986). In addition, there was a black independent production sector, commissioned (for example, by television) on the basis of single projects. Among these relatively mainstream ­features, mostly backed by Channel 4, were films that overtly tackled issues of nation, race, and identity. We can include My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985), Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1986), and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears, 1987) as major examples. The location of black filmmaking within the ‘independent’ sector permitted the possibility of expressing various ideological and political themes in a direct manner and offering a critique of ‘Englishness’ in relation to the newly emerging or shifting (sexual, racial, class, and cultural) identities. Like much of the 1970s black‐produced work, these films used the cinematic space to set in motion alternative narratives and perspectives, particularly in

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response to the racialised discourses of British television because, to date, this had reigned as the privileged and primary cultural space through which the nation’s ethnographical common‐sense or accumulation of prejudices had developed. ­ This had an important bearing on the terms in which the new black British films were received, acclaimed, and analysed – as oppositional, subcultural, contentious, alternative, heterogeneous, and revised. In turn, a set of critical debates in relation to diaspora aesthetics, identity, ‘third cinema’, and hybridity were generated, with the emphasis on cultural mixing, ambivalence, multiple reference‐points, and identities. At the heart of much of the black British cinema of the time, was the concept of political Blackness (now black with a capital B), an umbrella category through which a diverse and politicised notion of what it means to be Black was accommodated. So British Asian filmmaking, also with roots in the black cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s, was categorised, along with British African Caribbean filmmaking of that time, as a ‘cinema of duty’ (Malik 1996), preoccupied with the task of telling forgotten or buried stories, writing unwritten histories and ‘correcting’ the misrepresentations of mainstream production (Bailey 1992, p. 38). ‘Political Blackness’ therefore depended on a ‘debiologised’ understanding of what could be identified as ‘Black’. The apparent seamlessness of affiliatory cultural politics and identification across ethnic groupings made it an unusual and distinctive case in Europe and fashioned an exciting moment in critical race studies film criticism. These cross‐cutting ties, stemming from a history of colonialism, an ‘othered’ Britishness, and shared racism produced a complex but unified black British presence in cinema. Scholarly work, funding streams, policy approaches, cinema programmers, journalistic publication – but apparently not audiences outside the intellectual or art cinema community – had all supported this inclusive notion of black British cinema, which was predicated on the following ideals, described here by the former Head of the BFI’s African‐Caribbean Unit (1992–1997), June Givanni: The vision was expansive. It embraced notions of ‘Third Cinema’, cinemas of ­resistance, cinemas that existed in spite of social and economic or political pressure. They all seemed to have a common and shared position: not only to tell stories of experiences excluded from the agendas of Hollywood/Bollywood and European cinema, but also to find ways of subverting the conventions of filmmaking to serve their own specific project in storytelling. (Givanni 2004, p. 62)

The BFI Unit’s publication of the Black Film Bulletin (edited by Givanni) was a significant platform for ‘cross‐collaborative ideas and intersectional dialogues’ and acted ‘symbolically as a trans‐generational, critical intervention on Black creative tradition’ (Asante 2014). On an industrial level, and in spite of the notions of independence through which many so‐called ‘black films’ operated, the practical dependency on the shifting political agendas of cultural policy and arts subsidy was inevitably involved.



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By the mid‐ to late‐1980s, a series of debates also began to emerge which pointed to the limitations of discussing race and representation within dualist (‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’) terms, and shifted the emphasis to how a multiplicity of views, both of and from black people, could be presented within British arts and culture. This moved from challenging stereotypes themselves as ‘wrong’ or ‘negative’ (which presumed that there was a ‘right’ or ‘positive’ way of categorising Blackness), to a position that questioned if there were any definite (racial) categories to represent at all. This signalled a ‘cultural turn’ described by Stuart Hall in his influential paper ‘New Ethnicities’ (delivered at the 1988 Institute for Contemporary Arts conference), as representing the ‘end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ (Hall, in Mercer 1988, p. 28). This offered the prospect of a new liberatory position from which the black artist or filmmaker might speak as well as a more diverse conception of ‘black representation’ that acknowledged the requirement to articulate difference not just across communities but within them as well. Thus, it began to be argued that ‘black’ was in fact something which could not be defined in any simple or singular way. Of  course, this also involved accepting that not all black films are good, not all ‘realistic representations’ are positive, not all black artists are non‐sexist, non‐racist, and so on, and that black audiences/critics/producers themselves had to move away from a black = good/white = bad orthodoxy (see Williamson, in Mercer 1988). What had become increasingly clear by the end of the 1980s was that ‘the polarisation between essentialist and anti‐essentialist theories of black identity’ had ‘become unhelpful’ (Gilroy 1993, p. x). It was argued, for example, that when reviewing and commenting on new Black‐British film practices, a new model of criticism needed to develop which moved away from the grammar of Euro‐American mainstream film theory. Kobena Mercer wondered ‘whether a more adequate model of criticism might not be derived from the critical practice performed in the films themselves’ (Mercer 1994, p. 56) and developed a notion of ‘interruption’ which would entail a more direct relationship between the critic and the text (Mercer 1994, pp. 53–66). The new emphasis on the hitherto under‐developed fact that we are all ethnically located (Hall, in Mercer 1988), and that we all occupy an ethnic space, also triggered a new set of discussions around ‘whiteness’, an important intervention in defamiliarising and interrogating what is typically deemed colourless within cultural production and, indeed, in broader societal contexts.

The Fragmentation of the ‘Black’ in Black British Cinema If the 1980s was characterised by such openings, both in terms of the kinds of films that were produced and the film criticism that was generated, the 1990s brought a shift in mood that involved the closure of some of these spaces and also

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a fragmentation within the notion of political Blackness that had become so important within a national British film culture. By 1990, the revenue funding of the film and video workshops had virtually ceased and there was a general awareness of the new limitations and requirements for filmmakers (to be commercially‐ oriented and work on a project‐by‐project basis). In terms of the daily practicalities of securing funding, the core financiers were now investing in more ‘obvious’ theatrical releases, and commercial expectations of ‘black film’ were generally low. The cheaper (to produce and screen) short film format became the dominant and most accessible form of film‐making for black‐British practitioners – showcased in She‐Play (Channel 4), Short and Curlies (Channel 4) and 10 × 10 (BBC 2) and supported by specialist schemes such as Black Screen/Siren Spirits (BBC/BFI), Synchro Projects (Carlton Television/Arts Council), and Crucial Films’ Funky Black Shorts and Crucial Tales – which were specifically set up for black‐British filmmakers to work on short films for television. In spite of the changing infrastructure of British television, Channel 4, a core financier and exhibitor of black‐British film, continued to play a major role, broadcasting specific black film seasons dedicated, for example, to a new wave of South Asian diaspora films such as Electric Moon (Pradip Krishen, 1990), Masala (Srinivas Krishna, 1991), Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991), and Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1994). Many of these films would have often been missed at the cinema (often for distribution reasons or simply because they had only been granted a fleeting cinematic release) but were now being brought to viewers and sometimes co‐produced by television. Since the black film sector had traditionally faced a problem with mainstream exhibition and audience‐building, this remained an important intervention. These developments underpinned the demise of Black collective film practice and encouraged a shift towards the production of more ‘cross‐over’, commercially‐ geared, Black‐British feature films during the 1990s such as Wild West (David Attwood, 1992) and Welcome to the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1994). These narrative features, along with Brothers in Trouble (Udayan Prasad, 1995), My Son, The Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997), Guru in Seven (Shani Grewal, 1997), Speak Like a Child ( John Akomfrah, 1998), and Rage (Newton L. Aduaka, 1999) were often (though not exclusively) feature‐film directorial debuts for the directors and represented a broad set of films: some more, some less commercial, and a few involving white directors. Among them, there were signs of a more routine, narrative‐based direction in the work of filmmakers such as Julian Henriques, Gurinder Chadha, and John Akomfrah, all of whom had a strong background in documentary film‐ making. In spite of the differences, virtually all of these features were at least partially funded by the BFI, BBC Films, Film Four, or the Arts Council Lottery Fund. However, at least half had extremely limited distribution and promotion, and slipped by virtually unnoticed beyond the Black and Asian film festival circuit.2 Strong, conventionally‐funded films, such as Speak Like a Child and Wild West, did not achieve the levels of distribution, critical attention, and commercial



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Figure 24.1  ‘From ragga to riches’: Babymother (1998).

recognition that they arguably deserved. Equally, while the ‘guerrilla‐filmmaking’ techniques involved in films such as Guru in Seven and Welcome to the Terrordome were generally recognised for (and promoted in relation to) their apparent ­determination to get completed ‘by any means necessary’, they also generated very mixed critical reactions.3 An interesting example is provided by Babymother, the lower‐profile ‘reggae‐musical’ directed by Julian Henriques, which offered a rare contemporary illustration of what Henriques calls the ‘sealed subculture’ of the London dancehall scene, specifically from a black female viewpoint (Henriques, in Wambu and Arnold 1999, p. 25) (Figure 24.1). Loaded as it was with ‘positive messages’ (its promotional tagline was ‘From Ragga to Riches’), Babymother transported us to London’s cultural fringes, avoiding the conventional ‘race relations/ racial tensions/community relations’ paradigm of many black British feature films. The authenticity of the film’s mise‐en‐scène, music, locations, encoded body language, in‐jokes, and wordplay among characters highlight the filmmakers’ refusal to solicit a mainstream white audience by either including white characters or diluting the ‘accuracy’ of this knowing cultural scene. The film partly lifted itself out of the more standard social‐realist framework, by approaching the narrative and form with a sense of romanticism. Thus, Babymother produced a magic‐ realist combination of the fantastic (the musical) and the mundane (the social melodrama). The perceived ‘ethnic specificity’ of Babymother  –  apparent in the critical responses to the film – was therefore particularly striking since the film in fact rarely broke with the emotive conventions of mainstream (British) cinema. As with a large constituent of black British feature films, London provided a significant backdrop for Babymother, treated here as playground of pleasures and

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thus wholly antithetical both to the deliberately unacknowledged (in the film) burgeoning reality of ongoing racism and violent crime on Britain’s streets, and to the film’s bleak representations of urban tower‐block life (filmed in the well‐ known Stonebridge housing estate). As with films ranging from Pressure to My Beautiful Laundrette to Henriques’ preparatory docu‐drama, We the Ragamuffin (Channel 4, 1992), Babymother represented the metropolitan space as a site of contestation and cultural negotiation. Babymother’s commercial under‐performance says something more general about the paradoxical situation in which Black British film has traditionally found itself: while Black‐led music, literature, fashion, vernacular, and dance styles have been globally appropriated, black British film has remained acutely marginalised. Henriques expressed a fundamental challenge in making a film that ‘doesn’t disrespect the source but allows access to the international market … as a black movie there’s even less room for failure’ (Henriques, in Mercer 1988). Following a certain process of self‐scrutiny about the politics of mainstreaming during the 1990s (Korte and Sternberg 2004), British Asian cinema appeared to be challenging the politics of cultural marginalisation by demonstrating how even ‘ethnic minority’ films with strong themes around identity and culture could be commercially successful. This trend began most obviously with Bhaji on the Beach (1992), the first feature of British Asian director Gurinder Chadha. Bhaji was part soap opera, part romantic comedy, part road movie, while also borrowing from the British social‐realist tradition and the narrative conventions and iconography of Bombay popular cinema to explore the generational, class, political, and personal tensions among a group of Asian women on a day trip to the seaside. By the end of the decade a new public image of ‘Asianness’ as a cool, hip, ­flamboyant, and desirable identity had developed, which was also tied to a strong financial drive to cash in on the so‐called ‘brown pound’. The exclusionary processes and cultural silences that had historically been experienced by Britain’s Asian artists were now eclipsed by flashes of hypervisibility in which Asian Britons were becoming the incumbents of a globalised, modern kind of creative culture. British Asian feature films produced in the late 1990s, notably East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999) – adapted from his stage‐play by Ayub Khan‐Din – and Chadha’s phenomenally successful Bend It Like Beckham (2002), facilitated a mainstreaming of a previously marginalised area of British cinema and were credited as significant examples of national, i.e. unprefixed, British cinema. By reaching an audience way beyond the art house and festival circuit, they facilitated an economically‐driven celebration of multicultural pluralism. The Asian breakthroughs were suggestive of a meritocratic cultural industry (the idea that films will succeed if they are ‘good’) and also, in a more political sense, of social equality in an emergent ‘post‐racial’ climate. The commercial potential of this aspect of British cinema trumped its significance within a broader diasporic cinema space. The fragmentation of the ‘black’ in ‘black British cinema’ also served to disperse critical discussions around race, ethnicity, and British



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cinema. A more direct focus on British Asian cinema was noticeable, typically within the broader nexus of debates around Asian diasporic culture rather than as a ‘cinema of resistance’. However, this also occurred within a highly contested multicultural environment in which the central tenets of multiculturalism were being widely critiqued. As Clare Alexander points out in her discussion of South Asian popular culture, these representations can serve as ‘a cultural diversion from the pursuit of social justice and equality’ (2008, p. 4). New strategic appeals for visibility and access by ethnic minority filmmakers were now having to be measured against the few British Asian ‘successes’ that were triumphing against the odds and appeared to have transcended the politics of normative social and cultural policy frameworks. They also helped obscure the more common reality of the more modest film careers of important figures who had helped lay the foundations of Black and Asian British cinema, including Yugesh Walia, Ruhul Amin, Ahmed A. Jamal, and Julian Henriques, to name just a few. Isaac Julien, who had been a prominent figure in film during the 1980s and early 1990s, turned his attention to museum and ­gallery work, and was nominated in 2001 for the prestigious Turner Prize. In terms of British cinema, persistent inequalities remained: for film programmer Gaylene Gould, the sector was still ‘fragmented, financially driven, and inherently racist’ (quoted in Givanni 2004, p. 74). Critically acclaimed, but commercially average British films which might be regarded as ‘black’ because of their subject‐matter, perspective, or creative personnel – such as Bullet Boy (2004), A Way of Life (2004), and Kidulthood (2006) – did not match the relative commercial success and public interest as British Asian cinema. Nor did they become recognisable exponents of national cinema by being acknowledged as distinctly ‘British’ on international film circuits. The different trajectories followed by black and Asian British cinema not only revealed the racial economies of contemporary British cinema but also how a distinction can be made between different kinds of British cinema(s) within a broader framework of a national cinema.

Current Frames: Black British Film in Post‐Multiculturalist Times These developments in British cinema in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium require us to move beyond an emphasis on the simple pleasures of hybridity made possible by the black British films of the 1980s and to consider its potential contradictions, risks, and drawbacks. John Akomfrah elucidates this shifting ­rhetorical value of ‘race’ in highlighting the complicated trajectories of defining oneself in hybrid or diasporic terms. As he explains, ‘If you define yourself like me, then you’re always being asked to somehow disavow something’ (Akomfrah, in Malik 2010). If ‘black Britishness’ was used as a political strategy for access and

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inclusion in the 1980s, by the 2000s it started to have a different currency. For Akomfrah: When you valorise and overcelebrate the in‐between, the interstices, you have to realise that it has dark sides and the implications are not always necessarily ­productive ones for people who have to inhabit that space on a daily basis – and I am talking purely on a filmmaking basis. (Akomfrah, in Malik 2010)

The ‘dark sides’ that Akomfrah alludes to involves recognising the underbelly of the hybrid, transcultural, diasporic experience. Black Audio Film Collective’s work gradually moved almost entirely into the gallery‐space (Eshun 2007, p. 96), eventually dissolving in 1998. More generally, what was now being observed was the ­scarcity in production and distribution of black British cinema, largely as a result of a lack of institutional support. But there are many factors affecting the state of black British cinema and the way ‘race’ is managed more generally in the creative sphere. One factor is the significant demise of a strong black British political movement abetted by the neoliberal institutionalisation of anti‐racist activities (Elliott‐Cooper 2013) and the emergence of black British social conservatism. This has coincided with critiques of state multiculturalism towards a reconstruction of assimilationist policies (Phillips 2004) that are ‘characterized by deliberate breaks with the social analyses developed by the black and anti‐racist left’ (Warmington 2015, p. 1159). Another factor is the wider political, social and technological developments in the cultural industries, including deregulation and further diversification of the media environment which has produced both opportunities and threats for British cinema. Cultural workers, including ethnic minority filmmakers, are themselves implicated in an industry that has shifted towards neoliberal market models (Saha 2012). The shifting currency of ‘race’ in the UK is deeply implicated in the increasingly market‐driven agendas of the creative industries alongside the racialisation processes that continue to structure power relations within British cinema practice and theory. Concurrently, questions of identity and race and ethnicity debates are now more complex and fragmented than ever, with a larger than ever mixed‐race population and the arrival of a range of refugee and migrant communities. As Hall acknowledged in the mid‐ 2000s, it is now clear that “‘black’ by itself – in the age of refugees, asylum seekers and global dispersal – will no longer do” (Hall 2006, p. 22). Another area where clear shifts have occurred is cultural policy. Questions of diversity – now more than ‘race’ – are on the industry’s agenda. For the BFI’s CEO, Amanda Nevill: To stay really relevant, it is vital that our film and television industries reflect and properly represent our society. Diversity is good for creativity; it supports economic growth, taps into underserved audiences and makes for good business sense. It’s a complex challenge but one we want to approach with an open heart and mind and renewed vigour. (British Film Institute 2014)



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Nevill speaks of a contemporary industry in which ‘creativity and fiscal policy is working hand in hand to make the UK the most exciting place on the planet to do business’ (Nevill 2015). These statements exemplify the wider vernacular turn towards broad conceptions of diversity, rather than the naming of specific communities evident in policy approaches in the 1980s. In late 2015, the BFI announced new BFI Diversity Standards across all Film Fund Lottery funding schemes, including film development, production, distribution and audience development. This new ‘diversity phase’ builds on the BFI’s ‘three‐ticks initiative’ which requires applicants to the BFI Film Fund to address at least three aspects of under‐representation, either in terms of on‐screen representation, creative teams, industry access, or audience development. According to the BFI, these new ‘Diversity Standards’, now to be applied to all films receiving BFI Lottery funding, involve a definition of diversity that will ‘recognise and acknowledge the quality and value of difference’ (British Film Institute 2015). Concretely, when one starts to look at some of the industrial realities, recent evidence suggests the persistence of low numbers of black, Asian, minority, and women filmmakers in mainstream filmmaking. While the problem of coding ‘race’ as ‘black’ appears to have been dealt with by the refusal to name specific communities in these current policy paradigms, this is not the same as saying that problems with race inequalities have been dealt with. Creative Skillset’s 2012 Employment Census identifies a significant drop in the proportion of BAME ­people working in the creative industries over the past decade. In film, excluding freelancers, the figure for the BAME workforce is 4.4% and for television it is 7.5%. Looking at film in London, where the vast majority (58%) of this workforce is located, the working BAME population is 28.8%. However, the BAME proportion of the film workforce in London is only 6% (Creative Skillset 2012). O’Brien and Oakley’s review, Cultural Value and Inequality (2015), maps the prevalence of concerns around inequality, racial and otherwise, across the sector. These real systemic inequalities evidenced by the lack of behind‐the‐scenes diversity, have been compounded by ‘Black flight’  –  where black directorial and acting talent has moved to the US for recognition. Idris Elba and Naomie Harris (Mandela), Chiwetel Ejiofor and Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Biyi Bandele (Half of a Yellow Sun), Amma Asante (Belle), Richard Ayoade’s (The Double), and David Oyelowo (Selma) are all such examples. The trend has been mirrored by the migration (mainly to the US) of a number of black British critical thinkers and practitioners who were so central to black British cinema studies (Kobena Mercer to Yale, Reece Auguiste to Colorado Boulder, for a time in the 2000s Paul Gilroy to Yale, and Isaac Julien to Harvard). While a particular black British film movement has become difficult to discern, never mind describe, there are many films that are notable for the ways in which they are tackling issues of race and ethnicity, and even racism, against the grain of a broad ‘diversity’ frame through which the creative industries now operates. John Akomfrah’s Sundance award‐winning film, The Stuart Hall Project (2013), distributed just a few months before Hall’s death in 2014, has signalled a small

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Figure 24.2  ‘A reflexive act of representation’: The Stuart Hall Project (2013).

revival in scholarly work influenced by cultural studies. Akomfrah entitled the three‐screen video installation portrait of Hall that preceded his film The Unfinished Conversation which reflects upon how Hall approached the study of race, identity, and culture. Hall was, of course, a key thinker in these areas and British cinema was a major source of his intellectual analysis. Rajinder Dudrah’s reading of The Stuart Hall Project, is interested in how Akomfrah ‘uses aesthetic means to represent the life and work of Hall as a public intellectual, but also how his aesthetic strategies are informed by and are in dialogue with certain of Hall’s ideas, in a reflexive act of representation’ (Dudrah 2015, p. 399) (Figure 24.2). In terms of dramatic features, other films stand out. Starred Up (David Mackenzie, 2013), which takes on some of the formal properties of the prison crime genre, focuses on the depressing grind of prison life. Although not a ‘black film’ in conventional terms, the film includes a robust treatment of race and racialised representation through the nuanced characterisation of three black inmates (played by Anthony Welsh, David Ajala, and Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) who serve to challenge crude representations of black criminality. Like Starred Up, Amma Asante’s romantic period drama, Belle (2013), was also taken up for UK ­distribution by Fox Searchlight Pictures, marking a particular success with regards to the vexed issue of distribution. In terms of distribution, Dear White People (2014) the low‐budget but commercially successful, US race‐centred satirical feature written and directed by Justin Simien, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, inadvertently raised important issues for British cinema (especially around distribution and exhibition). In spite of its many accolades, the film failed to secure a mainstream UK distributor and became part of an intense campaign (mobilised through



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the press and social media) to bring it to UK audiences. A specific criticism was levelled against the BFI, because they had refused Lottery funding to the New Black Film Collective (one of only two black film distribution companies in the UK) to help support the film. However, the BFI later approved a Lottery award through the BFI Distribution Fund to widen the theatrical potential of the film. The 2015 documentary feature, The Hard Stop (George Amponsah)  –  named after the police procedure – told the story of Mark Duggan’s death in 2011, which was followed by the London riots. Shot on location around Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, the film captures the lives and experiences of Duggan’s friends and family following his death and these are interspersed with news coverage of Duggan’s death along with personal testimonies. The thematic focus and political elements apparent within many of these films, whether in documentary, satirical, or dramatic narrative forms, suggest an ongoing concern with issues of racial injustice and national identity, but also with the processes and politics of getting more marginalised forms of filmmaking seen more widely. It is clear, as evidenced by debates around recent films such as Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years A Slave (2013), that cinema continues as a significant cultural space through which critical race debates around authorship, agency, representation, and genre usefully converge. For Gerald Sim, in his mapping of key developments in critical race film studies in the US, these major successes (the first directed by Quentin Tarantino, a white American and the second by Steve McQueen, a black Londoner) have demonstrated how film criticism around ‘race’ is ‘discernibly active in public discourse’ (Sim 2014, p. 5). For Izzo, who analyses the relationship between a new wave of ‘black films’ and the US presidential ­success of Obama, there are signs of both post‐racial and neo‐racist elements in recent African‐American cinema that point to an anxiety around how race and representation are currently positioned in popular culture (Izzo 2014). These changing discursive and lived contexts are the background against which black and Asian British cinemas are also formed, managed and debated.

Conclusion We are left with some uncertainty about the direction of race and ethnicity debates in the context of British cinema. The various creative, critical, and intellectual interventions associated with black British film have helped to construct a powerful theory‐practice interface that has informed what we understand British cinema to be as well as contributing to our understandings of British cultural and social formations more generally. Thus, black British intellectual traditions and black British cultural production have together made major contributions to broader (global) debates around diasporic identity and postcoloniality that now form such an important part of transnational cinema debates.

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Black British cinema has provided a major example of how the paradigm of the national may be used to understand better the production, consumption, and ­representation of cultural identity in an increasingly connected, contested global environment. The turn to the transnational in film studies (Higbee and Hwee Lim 2014) sometimes demands a counter‐intuitive return to the local in order to examine broader social processes and problems. This chapter suggests the need for further conceptual work that brings together Film Studies and Critical Race Studies.4 Such an approach – what we might term Critical Race Film theory – might address how the race, racism, and power nexus relates to analytical understandings of British cinema production and also how it is theorised. This is important because British cinema is a space in which dominant analytical categories and representational power are constantly produced and thus remains a critical site for a disruptive politics and the recoding of racialised representations.

Notes 1 By extension, ‘Blackness’ or ‘Whiteness’ are terms that cannot be simply or conclusively defined, and consequently phrases such as ‘White/Black‐produced’, ‘Black film’, ‘Black production’ are not intrinsic or homogeneous categories. 2 This includes ‘Bite The Mango’ in Bradford, the Black Filmmakers’ International Film Festival at the ICA, the ‘Positive, Negatives’ annual Black film festival in Sheffield, the Black Screen Festival in Liverpool, and ‘Tongues on Fire’: Asian Women’s Film Festival. 3 See Gilroy (1995) and Mansel Stimpson’s response in the letters page of Sight and Sound (March 1995, p. 64). 4 While this interdisciplinary conceptual approach is apparent in current academic criticism in the US (see Izzo 2014 and Sim 2014), it is much more difficult to locate in the UK.

References Alexander, Claire (2008). The problem of South Asian popular culture: a view from the UK. South Asian Popular Culture 6 (1): 1–12. Asante, Jan (2014). ‘Black Film Bulletin Revisited’. Available at: http://www. junegivannifilmarchive.com/wp‐content/uploads/2014/09/Black‐Film Bulletin‐ Revisited.pdf (accessed 21 January 2015). Bailey, Cameron (1992). What the story is: an interview with Srinivas Krishna. Cineaction 28: 38–47. British Film Institute. (2014). BFI Film Fund Diversity Guidelines for Production. Available at: www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi‐film‐fund‐diversity‐guidelines‐ for‐production‐2014‐07.pdf (accessed 23 December 2014). British Film Institute. (2015). ‘BFI announces £1m Diversity Fund alongside new diversity standards for all BFI Film Fund projects’. Available at: www.bfi.org.uk/news‐opinion/ news‐bfi/announcements/bfi‐announces‐1m‐diversity‐fund‐alongside‐new‐ diversity‐strands (accessed 1 November 2015).



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Creative Skillset. (2012). Employment Census of the Creative Industries. Available at: http://creativeskillset.org/assets/0000/5070/2012_Employment_Census_of_the_ Creative_Media_Industries.pdf (accessed 3 December 2014). Dudrah, Rajinder (2015). Reading the Stuart Hall Project. Journal of British Cinema and Television 12 (3): 383–401. Dyer, Richard (1997). White. London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard (2000) (orig. 1988). White. In: Film and Theory: An Anthology (ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller), 733–751. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott‐Cooper, Adam (2013). The Stuart Hall Project: review and reflections. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 17 (6): 827–834. Eshun, Kodwo (2007). The Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul (1995). Unwelcome. Sight and Sound February: 18–19. Givanni, June (2004). A curator’s conundrum: programming “Black Film” in 1980s–1990s Britain. The Moving Image 4: 60–75. Hall, Stuart (2006). Black diaspora artists in Britain: three “moments” in post‐war history. History Workshop Journal 61 (1): 1–24. Higbee, Will and Hwee Lim, Song (2014). Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies. Transnational Cinemas 1 (1): 7–21. hooks, bell (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. Izzo, David Garrett (2014). Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post‐Racial and Neo‐Racist Cinema. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Julien, Isaac and Mercer, Kobena (1988). De Margin and De Centre. Screen 29 (4): 2–11. Korte, Barbara and Sternberg, Claudia (2004). Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian Film since the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Malik, Sarita (1996). Beyond “the cinema of duty”? The pleasures of hybridity: black British film of the 1980s and 1990s. In: Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (ed. Andrew Higson), 202–215. London: Cassell. Malik, Sarita (2010). The dark side of hybridity: contemporary black and Asian British cinema. In: European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (ed. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg), 132–151. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mercer, Kobena (ed.) (1988). Black Film, British Cinema, ICA Documents 7. London: ICA. Mercer, Kobena (1994). Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Nevill, Amanda (2015). ‘New BFI stats show record year for UK film in 2014’. Available at: www.bfi.org.uk/news‐opinion/news‐bfi/announcements/new‐bfi‐stats‐show‐record‐ year‐uk‐film‐2014 (accessed 4 February 2015). O’Brien, Dave and Oakley, Kate (2015). Cultural value and inequality: a critical literature review. AHRC. Available at: www.ahrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/report oninequalityandculture (accessed 18 September 2015). Phillips, Trevor (2004). ‘Multiculturalism’s legacy is “have nice day” racism’. The Guardian (28 May). Pines, Jim (1988). The cultural context of black‐British cinema. In: Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (ed. Mbye B Cham and Claire Andrade‐ Watkins), 26–36. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Saha, Anamik (2012). Beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage: television industries and the production of “race”. Media, Culture and Society 34 (4): 424–438. Sim, Gerald (2014). The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury. Wambu, Onyekachi and Arnold, Kevin (1999). A Fuller Picture. London: BFI. Warmington, Paul (2015). The emergence of black British social conservatism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (7): 1152–1168.

Part V

Redefining ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ Cinemas

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The Englishness of British Cinema Beyond the Valley of the Corn Dollies1 Julian Petley

Introduction For many years now I’ve taught a module entitled ‘British Cinemas, British Identities’. It has always struck me as crucial to stress the plural nation of both, and I’ve routinely included films set in Scotland (for example, Sweet Sixteen (2002) and The Angels’ Share [2012]), Wales (Twin Town (1997) and Patagonia [2010]), and Northern Ireland (Bloody Sunday [2002]). But, simply because the module needs to include a reasonable number of British films about which there is a substantial literature on which the students can draw, I’ve always been painfully aware that it consists primarily of films about and set in England – and a fairly narrow range at that. And my awareness has developed into distinct uneasiness as, year by year, questions about what constitutes specifically English identity, and about how specifically English interests should be represented at the political level in the UK, have inexorably risen up the political agenda. Of course, everything is made more complicated by the fact that my students, like so many people in England, are confused about the very nature of Britain (and its synonyms the United Kingdom and Great Britain), and especially about England’s position within it. Thus we have to start with the ritual warning about not considering England and Britain as being one and the same, and by pointing out that the latter is of relatively recent origin, having been formed by the Acts of Union in 1707 between England and Scotland, and by the Acts of Union in 1801 between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland. We also have to note that the present shape of Britain dates only to 1921, when the island of

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Ireland was partitioned, and the Irish Free State became a sovereign state in its own right. But as Norman Davies points out: One of the most extraordinary aspects of the current scene lies in the number of citizens of the United Kingdom who do not appear to be familiar with the basic parameters of the state in which they live. They often do not know what it is called; they do not distinguish between the whole and the constituent parts; and they have never grasped the most elementary facts of its development. Confusion reigns on every hand (1999, pp. xxvi‐xxvii).

Or as David Goodhart (2008) has put it: The paradox of Britain is that although it was substantially made by the English, they did not  –  unlike the other British nations  –  define their own role in it. England dissolved itself into Britain, and so to this day has only minimal political/ institutional identity. There is indeed no formal English political community, one of the reasons why sport has become such a rallying point for expressions of English identity.

Britain/England Examples, both past and present, of such elision and confusion are legion. For example, Macauley’s The History of England (1848–1861) includes extensive ­coverage of Ireland and Scotland, and Walter Bagehot’s famous work on the government of Britain is called The English Constitution (1867). The so‐called ‘UK riots’ in August 2011 were actually confined to London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Bristol – that is, England. Given the nature of the bands gathered under the Britpop banner, a more accurate label would surely have been Engrock. And the notion of English literature has, as Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner have pointed out, proved to be, at least up until the fairly recent past, a remarkably ‘elastic structure able to adduce “other” ­peoples and literatures into its own canonicity’ (2013, p. 7) – think, for example, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde to name but a very few. In terms of cinema, such elisions are numerous. As Jeffery Richards points out, in the Second World War, the cinema was careful to characterise its forces units as embracing all regions, countries and classes of the United Kingdom …. But the identity of Britain continued to be more or less interchangeable with England, as indicated by the use of the popular song ‘There’ll always be an England’. (1997, p. 109)



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This song was used, for example, in Went the Day Well? (1942), 2,000 Women (1944), and The Captive Heart (1946). Andrew Higson also argues in Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s: If there is an English cinema or an English film industry, it is very difficult to identify or to demarcate, and it is rarely spoken of. Anglophone film historians conventionally speak of British cinema, as do contemporary professional English‐speaking film critics and reviewers. (2011, p. 4)

The familiar, indeed habitual, elision is well illustrated by C.A. Lejeune’s remark about Leslie Howard that ‘he had become in an odd way a symbol of England, standing in for all that is most deeply rooted in the British character’ (quoted in Richards 1997, p. 90). But even Richards himself slips in this kind of elision from time to time. Thus of Pimpernel Smith (1941) and The First of the Few (1942), he remarks that ‘their humanity and humour, their sensitivity and idealism, and above all their quiet and abiding Englishness made them masterpieces of British cinema’ (Richards 1997, p. 90). Of Leslie Howard, he notes that his British wartime films ‘are notable for their sense of spirituality but also for an Englishness characterised by a sense of humour  –  gentle, ironic, understated, witty  –  and a sense of proportion  –  emotional restraint, compassion, sensitivity’ (Richards 1997, pp.  90–91). And in The Demi‐Paradise (1943), Laurence Olivier plays a Russian ­engineer ‘whose preconceptions about England are gradually dispelled and who comes to appreciate the secret of Britain’s survival and success’ (Richards 1997, p. 102). The elision is present in the very title of Raymond Durgnat’s A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, the sub‐heading of whose first chapter, ‘The State of the Nation’, is ‘The British Constitution’ (1970, p. 13). A similar point could be made about the title of Alexander Walker’s Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (1974). Of course, it could be argued, perfectly reasonably, that what these various authors are acknowledging is that the phenomena which they are discussing are both British and English. A few writers have, however, addressed the English question head on. For example, Lindsay Anderson once asked: ‘What sort of cinema have we got in Britain?’, responding that: ‘First of all it is necessary to point out that that it is an English cinema, (and Southern English at that), metropolitan in attitude, and entirely middle class’ (2004 [1957], p. 234). However, as Steve Blandford points out, this question is still seldom discussed: In the ever growing body of literature about British cinema there is even less discussion of the idea of a distinctive ‘English’ cinema than there is of the emergence of cinema that can, within certain limits, be defined as Scottish or Welsh. At  one level the explanation for this is simple: for most people the term ‘British’ remains synonymous with ‘English’. However, in an academic climate that has been

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relatively pre‐occupied with the discourses of nationalism and postcolonialism, it is surprising that so few questions have emerged about the implications of devolution for an emergent English culture and therefore an English cinema. (2007, p. 19)

There are, however, notable exceptions. For example, the subtitle of David Pirie’s A New Heritage of Horror (2009) is ‘The English Gothic Cinema’, and Jonathan Rigby’s book on the same subject is entitled English Gothic (Rigby 2015), with both authors anchoring their subjects firmly within the Gothic tradition in English literature (which includes, of course, the Irish authors Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker). Charles Barr’s book on pre‐Hollywood Hitchcock is entitled English Hitchcock (1999), as opposed to Tom Ryall’s Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (1996) and Maurice Yacowar’s Hitchcock’s British Films (2010). Noting that ‘it is conventional to refer to British cinema, rather than English’, Barr set out to anchor Hitchcock firmly within specifically English culture (Barr 1999, p. 6). Observing that The Manxman (1928) was filmed in Cornwall and Hertfordshire, and that in The 39 Steps (1935) there is only one significant part for a Scots actor ( John Laurie), he claims that these, like Hitchcock’s other works before he left for America, ‘are English films’ (Barr 1999, p. 6). Barr draws particular attention to Hitchcock’s avowed indebtedness to English literature, and particularly to figures such as John Buchan (whose Greenmantle and The Three Hostages he came close to filming, and whose The 39 Steps he did indeed film, although it should be noted that Buchan was in fact the Scottish First Baron Tweedsmuir), J.B. Priestley, John Galsworthy (who wrote the play The Skin Game on which Hitchcock based his 1931 film of the same name) (Figure 25.1), and Marie Belloc Lownes (author of the novel and play on which The Lodger [1926] is based), and the less generously acknowledged ‘influence of his predominantly English source materials or of his English scriptwriters’ (Barr 1999, p. 8). Barr argues that ‘Hitchcock’s notions of good writing, of the well‐made script, were deeply rooted in [the notion of the well‐made play], and in his memories of regular theatre‐going in London in the 1910s and 1920s’ (Barr 1999, p. 13). Thus, Charles Bennett wrote the stage play on which Blackmail (1929) was based, and was the main screenwriter for The 39 Steps and Young and Innocent (1937). Easy Virtue (1927) was based on a play by Noël Coward, Secret Agent (1936) on a play based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. He also tried to set up a film of J.M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose. Meanwhile Sabotage (1936) was based on the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (admittedly another author co‐opted into the canon of English literature), and Jamaica Inn (1939) had its origins in a novel by Daphne du Maurier.

The Return of the ‘English Question’ The attempt to separate out Englishness from Britishness, and to define what cultural Englishness might consist of, is, I would argue, particularly important in the present conjuncture. Ever since the 1990s, but particularly in the new millennium, the



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Figure 25.1  English Hitchcock: The Skin Game (1931).

‘English question’ has been put very firmly back on the political agenda, increasingly in overtly nationalistic ways, and the study of British cinema (and indeed of all forms of British culture) needs seriously to engage with this. In particular, it is extremely important to investigate what forms of Englishness are culturally available other than what appear at the moment to be the dominant ones – ranging from ‘heritage’‐ style representations to the rhetoric of the English Defence League, and the UK Independence Party (which in my view should more properly be called the English Independence Party). What I want to argue in this chapter is that films made in and about England are, if taken as a whole, and if not viewed solely through the prism of a certain conception of heritage, a rich repository of diverse versions of Englishness, versions which can and indeed should be mobilised against the overtly and stridently nationalistic forms which are now coming to dominate certain kinds of discourse. But before I attempt to make this argument, it is necessary to give a brief overview of the return of the ‘English question’. At the turn of the present century, Tom Nairn noted a ‘rising quotient of Englishry’ and of ‘stand‐alone‐Englishness’ (2000, p. 41). In 1995, the card manufacturer Clintons produced the first cards celebrating St George’s Day (23 April), and within two years were selling over 50 000 every April. The cross of St George was revived by English football fans when England was drawn against Scotland in the European Championships in 1996, and the semi‐final clash with Germany was the occasion for crude and xenophobic German‐bashing in the tabloid press,

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most  notoriously in the Mirror, 24 June 1996, with its headline ‘ACHTUNG! SURRENDER! FOR YOU FRITZ, ZE 1996 EURO CHAMPIONSHIP IS OVER!’ (for further examples of this kind of rhetoric, see Weight 2002, p. 709). The following year the Sun’s English edition printed a large image of the cross on St George’s Day and asked readers to put it in their windows, and on the same day in 1999, it published a four‐page pull‐out entitled ‘100 Reasons Why It’s Great to be English’. These included conventional English icons such as the Queen Mother (top of the list), Shakespeare, red phone boxes and Wimbledon, but also more modern and populist ones such as the Beatles, Barbara Windsor, Michael Caine, fish and chips, Oasis and Page 3 girl Melinda Messenger. The paper wondered ‘what is it about the English that makes them so complacent about their birthright?’ and suggested that ‘it’s almost as if we are embarrassed to feel proud’. Membership of the Royal Society of St George saw its membership quadruple in 1999. In the same year, the English Tourist Board changed its name to the English Tourism Council, and its logo from the red rose to the cross of St George, noting: ‘We were looking for an icon to take us into the twenty‐first century and chose St George because he is emerging from the shadows after several decades of neglect’ (quoted in Weight 2002, p. 712). During Euro 2004, the Conservative politician Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph, 10 June, in an article headlined ‘England Expects … a Fairer Deal’: The popularity of the English flag is a huge political message, a statement of exuberant loyalty, and also of a certain frustration. On the lipsticked conks of our countrymen this weekend, we read a vindication of all those – like my old friend Simon Heffer – who said that the hour was approaching when England would be awakened, would rub her eyes, and wonder whether she was being fairly treated. In this contagion of red and white, I divine a growing sense of particular allegiance to that subset of the United Kingdom population that makes up 85 per cent of the population, and that increasingly feels that it does not get a fair suck of the sauce bottle; and that feeling is becoming electorally significant.

According to the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes survey, in 2007 33% of respondents said they were English and not British, or more English than British; this had risen from 24% in 1997 (Curtice 2011, p. 60). The same surveys showed that in 2011, when forced to choose between giving their nationality as either British or English, 49% of English respondents opted for English, compared to 31% in 1999, 47% in 2006, and 41% in 2009 (Kenny 2014, p. 89). In the 2011 Census, in England 60% of the population identified themselves as solely English ( Jones et al. 2013, p. 6). In political terms, the revival of Englishness is largely a reaction to devolution, and especially to the powers granted to the Scottish Parliament. There are five main grievances: Scottish Members of Parliament being able to vote at Westminster on matters affecting only England, giving rise to the demand for ‘English votes for  English laws’; the number of Scots in the Labour cabinet, who were held ­responsible for the creation of the Scottish Parliament as a result of the Scotland Act 1998;  English resentment at greater public spending in Scotland than in



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England – allegedly with the aid of ‘English money’; the emergence of marked differences of attitude and policy towards the public funding of healthcare and education; and differing attitudes towards the EU, with the Scots being generally far more positive than the English, as was conclusively demonstrated in the 2016 EU Referendum, when the Scots voted to remain by 62%. As Richard Weight has pointed out: ‘Devolution has forced the English to do what their partners did in the second half of the twentieth century – to reconsider who they are as a people’ (2002, p. 731). But this has been particularly difficult for the English because, traditionally in England, there was little or no tension between people’s ancient nationality and that which had been constructed around the British state. Theirs was a cultural nationalism which no longer required a political dimension because England was the dominant country in the United Kingdom. The problems which the English faced when their partners became unhappy with the arrangement arose not only from the fact that they had forgotten how to be English, but that they had forgotten how to articulate their national identity politically. (2002, p. 10)

Or as Anthony Barnett noted of the research which he undertook for his seminal book Iron Britannia (2012 [1982]) during the Falklands War, when he asked English people: ‘Which comes first, being English or British?’, they simply could not understand the question. He continued: My explanation was that asking the English to rank their primary identification in terms of whether they were more British or English was like asking a coin if it was more obverse or reverse. Such a question genuinely does not make sense. For the Scots, Welsh and Irish, Britishness is a separate identity which they share with the English. For the English, Britishness was built into who they were. (Barnett 2016, p. 234)

One must also, of course, acknowledge the discontent on the part of many English (but not Scottish) people with the UK’s membership of the EU. This grew ever stronger in the new millennium, assiduously fanned by a London‐based daily press, and eventually led to the UK voting to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, although it is clear that much of this discontent was actually engendered by the stresses and strains caused by the processes of ever‐intensifying globalisation, for which the EU took much of the blame, albeit in a largely inchoate manner. In this respect it’s interesting to observe that Andrew Higson notes that ‘we live in a period where old national ties and cultural boundaries are constantly being stretched, challenged and overridden … Is the apparent erosion of traditional national cultures – and national cinemas – necessarily a bad thing?’ (2011, p. 48). In my view, the answer is a qualified ‘yes’, since to argue otherwise is to ignore, or at least downplay, the fact that the forces of globalisation – whether these manifest themselves as the supra‐ national diktats of the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and ‘Brussels’, ‘floods’ of refugees, jobs exported to countries with the lowest labour costs, indigenous industries destroyed by cheap imports, or other

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such phenomena – are actually giving rise to a revival of nationalism in many parts of the world, England most certainly included. Of course, nationalism may on occasion be a progressive force – when, for example, it enables a colonised people to assert its own identity against that of the coloniser  –  but in contemporary Europe, and especially in England, it is increasingly manifesting itself in ­aggressively xenophobic and isolationist forms which are the polar opposite of progressive, and evoke alarming parallels with the 1930s. It is hard to disagree with Krishan Kumar when he states that: ‘In whichever direction they look, the English find themselves called upon to reflect upon their identity, and to re‐think their position in the world. The protective walls that shielded them from these questions are coming down’ (2003, p. 16). In these circumstances, the English have been forced to ask themselves the kinds of questions that other nations have engaged in for a long time. Not surprisingly, not having a tradition of inquiry of this kind, they have found it difficult to find satisfying answers … For the first time ever the English have had to turn the mirror directly to themselves, to see who they are and where they may be going. (2003, pp. 250–251)

Kumar concludes that there has never before been a time when some coherent account of English national identity was more needed. Equally there has never before been a time when the lack  of a tradition of reflection on such identity has more glaringly revealed its ­consequences. (2003, p. 263)

A Reactionary and Self‐pitying Mythology The problem is, as I indicated earlier, that so many of the dominant definitions of what constitutes Englishness are backward‐looking and nostalgic at best, and profoundly reactionary, not to say exclusionary, at worst. These, of course, are the main charges laid at the door of the representations of England (and indeed of Britain as a whole) associated with the ‘heritage industry’ (Hewison 1987: Wright 2009) and its antecedents in those figures given to listing elements of ‘quintessential’ Englishness which are in fact extremely narrow and limited, for example, Stanley Baldwin (quoted in Giles and Middleton 1995, pp. 97–102), John Betjeman (quoted in Paxman 1999, p. 151) and Peter Scott (quoted in Wright 2009, pp. 79–80). Significantly, this kind of metonymic stereotyping (or listomania) shows absolutely no sign of abating, as noted by Aughey and Berberich (2011, p. 4), and although this rather obsessive form of list‐making was mercilessly parodied by Julian Barnes in his novel England, England (1998, pp. 74–75, 83–85, 90–91, 142), the chapter entitled ‘England Wouldn’t be England Without’ in Alan Titchmarsh’s England, Our England (2007, pp. 130–136), which consists entirely of one long list, is almost entirely indistinguishable from Barnes’ parody. However, given the detailed attention paid to



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‘heritage’ in much of the literature on British cinema (see in particular Vincendeau 2001; Higson 2003, 2011; Monk 2011a; Vidal 2012), plus the fact that I discuss it later in this chapter, it is unnecessary to devote more space to it here. The vacuum noted by Weight and Kumar has now been filled by a self‐pitying mythology which sees the English as a beleaguered and much put‐upon Anglo‐ Saxon island race long menaced by continental European powers of one kind or another and now, into the bargain, sponged upon by the Scots and ‘floods’ of migrants. As Nairn has observed: There is no coherent, sufficiently democratic myth of Englishness – no sufficiently accessible and popular myth identity where mass discontents can find a vehicle. This is the source of the disconcerting lurch from a semi‐divine Constitution and the Mother of Parliaments to the crudest racialism. (1981, p. 294)

Furthermore, such enragé versions of Englishness, particularly as pumped out on a daily basis by significant sections of the national press (Billig 1995, pp. 93–127; Conboy 2006), has undoubtedly discouraged the public expression of other versions of Englishness, particularly on the part of the more liberal‐minded, since Englishness per se has become so closely associated with jingoism and a rabid nationalism of the ‘England for the English’ variety. I want now, however, to consider precisely these other versions of Englishness, before finally returning to the subject of culturally English cinema as a space in which such versions can, and indeed do, flourish.

‘The Diversity of it, the Chaos!’ Let me begin by returning to the topic of highly selective list making. In his speech to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22 April 1993, the eve of St George’s Day, John Major famously stated: Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said  –  ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the ­morning mist’ and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials. (Major 1993)

However, the quote from Orwell is selective to the point of distortion, even inversion, since what he actually said about England was as follows: The diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to‐and‐fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour exchanges, the rattle of pin‐tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking

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to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all of these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. (1970 [1941], pp. 75–76)

The operative word here is ‘diversity’. Of course, from a twenty‐first‐century perspective, many of the references now seem rather archaic, but at the time they most certainly would not have appeared so, and had Orwell been writing today, he would doubtless have chosen different facets of England in order to illustrate its diversity – mosques, motorways, and migrants perhaps among them. It is also worth remembering that when J.B. Priestley completed his famous ‘English Journey’ in 1933 he reported that he had seen ‘three Englands’. There was ‘old England, the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire, guide book and quaint highways and byways England’ (2009 [1934], p. 335) to which he took a bracingly anti‐‘heritage’ attitude, noting that ‘there are people who believe that in some mysterious way we can all return to this Old England; though nothing is said about killing off nine‐tenths of the present population, which would have to be the first step’ (2009, p. 336). Then there was nineteenth‐century industrial England, of which he provides a long list of varied features, and about which he declared: The less fortunate classes were very unlucky indeed in that England. They had some sort of security, which is more than many of them have now, but it was a security of monstrously long hours of work, miserable wages, and surroundings in which they lived like black‐beetles at the back of a disused kitchen stove … They all rushed into the towns and mills as soon as they could, as we know, which suggests that the dear old quaint England they were escaping from could not have been very satisfying. You do not hurry out of Arcadia to work in a factory twelve hours a day for about eighteen‐pence. (2009, p. 337)

The third England was the then new post‐war England of arterial and by‐pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance‐halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, grey‐hound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons. (2009, pp. 337–338)

Priestley approved of this England to the extent that it was ‘essentially democratic’, but also found in it ‘a rather depressing monotony’ and was concerned that too much of this life is being stamped on from outside, probably by astute financial gentlemen, backed by the press and their publicity services. You feel that too many of the people in this new England are doing not what they like but what they have been told they would like. (2009, p. 339)



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He also expressed the fear that ‘monotonous but easy work and a liberal supply of cheap luxuries might between them create a set of people entirely without ambition or any real desire to think and act for themselves, the perfect subjects for an iron autocracy’ (2009, pp. 339–340). The point about these quotations from Priestley and Orwell is that they demonstrate that even in the 1930s, part of that past so beloved by the heritage industry, there were those who were trying to think about England and Englishness in a geographically, socially, and culturally plural and diverse fashion. Those trying to do so today, given the waves of immigration which England, and indeed the rest of Britain, has experienced since the Second World War, would undoubtedly stress the importance of acknowledging ethnic plurality and diversity too, although in this respect it’s worth noting that, as far back as 1701, Daniel Defoe in his poem ‘The True Born Englishman’ observed: Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman …. For Englishmen to boast of generation, Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation. A true‐born Englishman’s a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

Thus, as Andrew Moor has pointed out, the signifying function of Englishness ‘need not necessarily invoke the clarion call of a muscular or bullish nationalism’, even if appeals to an assumed sense of Englishness are normally bound up with a right‐wing agenda. He continues: The issue may rather be phrased to take into account what sorts of identity are imaginable, what badges of belonging are being tabled, and to whom these badges are offered. In short, Englishness need not connote a ‘Little Englander’ mentality. If Englishness suggests an awareness of tradition, it can also suggest an acceptance of the modern. Neither need it invoke a sense of racial purity, for ‘England’ can be a wide and pluralistic idea, celebrated for its ‘incomingness’, allowing claims to tolerance, generosity and diversity, admitting its post‐imperial circumstances, its multi‐ ethnic communities and its broadening integration within Europe. Such aspirations can be part of the idea. (2005, p. 22)

Such an approach might also encourage more people from ethnic minorities to identify as English rather than British, thus weakening the identification of Englishness with whiteness. As Tom Nairn has put it: ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ may seem much the same thing to the English and to distant observers. They never do, to immigrants or other archipelago dwellers. In spite of its Royal and other absurdities, it is possible to think that one breathes more easily in a non‐ ethnic ‘Britain’ than one would do upon the narrow ground of England. (2000, pp. 39–40)

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A similar point was made by David Blunkett (2005), when he explained this phenomenon in terms of ‘the failure to challenge ethnically based, exclusionary accounts of Englishness’, accounts which are ‘based on myth and misrepresentation’. Instead, he argued: We need to articulate a progressive account of Englishness, to champion Englishness, expressed through our history, culture, and civic values. It demands that we tell a more honest account of the distinctive English tradition and English history. The challenge is to recast Englishness and English identity, exploring its place within the Union and its relationship with Europe and the wider world. In doing so we will enrich our understanding and sense of identity, and will be better equipped to deal with the challenges we face.

Almost inevitably, Blunkett then produced another list – this time of ‘dimensions of Englishness’ – but, again, what is significant about this is its breadth and diversity. Thus, his category of English landscapes and the sea includes not only the National Trust but William Morris, the Socialist cycling groups, the Ramblers, Labour’s Right to Roam policy and the new National Parks. Urban landscapes are celebrated for ‘the beauty and power of civic pride’ which can be found in them. Poetry includes not only Chaucer and Shakespeare but Tony Harrison and Wendy Cope. English radicalism is celebrated by the figures of John Wesley, Tom Paine, William Hazlitt, William Cobbett, the Pankhursts, George Orwell, William Wilberforce, the Levellers, the Chartists and the Matchgirl strikers, and English humour by Tony Hancock, Round the Horne, Monty Python, Dead Ringers, and Alan Bennett. Other celebrations of the sheer diversity of England and of English culture can be found in, among other places, Billy Bragg’s song ‘England, Half English’ (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/billy+bragg/england+half+english_20832978. html) and Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘England’s Glory’ (http://www. lyricsmode.com/lyrics/i/ian_dury_the_blockheads/englands_glory.html), which manages to rhyme Walnut Whips and Stafford Cripps. But the point is perhaps most forcefully made by Will Self in his diatribe against an English culture defined solely in terms of ‘ploughman’s lunches’, ‘corn dollies’, ‘chocolate boxy pomp and circumstance’ and the like, when he argues that ‘it positively pullulates with invention and polymorphous perversity’ and is ‘a culture of profound and productive oppositions’. He continues: Is English culture bigoted or liberal? It is both. Is it hermetic and introverted or expansive and cosmopolitan? It is all of these … While the old idea of a monocultural scape is impossible to sustain, England as the centre of that great roiling, post‐ colonial ocean of cultural ferment is alive and kicking. So I say: English culture is dead – long live English culture! (Self 2014 [1994])

Or to put it differently, we need to think of many Englands rather than merrie England, and these Englands as opposed to this England (let alone This England, a



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heritage magazine with a very dubious ideological past). Or again, as Michael Kenny argues, Englishness can be regarded not as a ‘bundle of national characteristics and a related sense of cultural proclivities’ but as ‘a term referencing a field of contestation and debate, rather than a set of fixed qualities and character traits’ (2014, p. 21).

A Certain Tendency of the English Cinema To return now to the topic of English cinema, it should be noted that the very title of Andrew Higson’s English Heritage, English Cinema indicates that the book’s focus is firmly on representations of England, which can only be welcomed in the present context. As he explains, his aims are to concentrate primarily on ‘films made in the 1980 and 1990s that either depict some aspect of the English past before the Second World War or are adapted from a canonical English literary text’ (2003, p. 10), and ‘to produce a reasonably comprehensive map of English costume drama of the 1980 and 1990s’ (2003, p. 3). Thus, although the subject of the book is clearly announced by its title as English cinema, it is actually limited to a certain kind of English cinema and its subject is films which in one way or another have been linked to discussions around questions of ‘heritage’. As Higson himself notes: All of the films cited engage in one way or another with English heritage. That is to say, they all offer some version of the English past, or some representation of the history of Englishness or the English cultural heritage, whether at home or abroad, in literature or reality. (2003, p. 25)

The problem is, however, that there are plenty of films which are set in and are about the English past which do not fit the conventional ‘heritage’ mould as it has been developed in a great deal of academic writing about British cinema, and indeed about British culture in general, a mould which Sheldon Hall criticises as ‘overly narrow and monolithic’ (2009, p. 51). Or, to put it another way, it is quite possible to imagine multiple, diverse, heterogeneous English heritages and not one English heritage, whether one is thinking about the English past itself, or specifically about cinematic representations of that past. As Raphael Samuel argued, following the initial critique of the ‘heritage industry’, the notion of heritage has been progressively broadened, which has involved ‘modernising and updating the idea of what constitutes the historical, as well as extending its social base’ (1996, p. 210). Thus, he concludes: So far from heritage being the medium through which a Conservative version of the national past becomes hegemonic, one could see its advent as part of a sea‐change in attitudes which has left any unified views of the national past – liberal, radical or

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Conservative – in tatters. Culturally it is pluralist. Everything is grist to its mill – the inter‐war years ‘semi’, the subject of a growing coffee‐table literature, no less than the stately home. (1996, p. 281)

Indeed, Higson himself lists a number of English period films and costume dramas set from the 1940s onwards but admits that he has deliberately left them out on the grounds that they seem to engage with the past in different ways to those set before the Second World War. Rarely do they engage with the same elite heritage discourses as most of the other films I have mentioned, discourses which have accrued around themselves the aura of ‘national tradition’, and which have consequently played such a central role in defining England and Englishness. (2003, pp. 32–34)

These include Hope and Glory (1988), The Dressmaker (1988), Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1989), The Land Girls (1998), Enigma (2001), A Private Function (1984), Dance with a Stranger (1985), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Absolute Beginners (1986), Wish You Were Here (1987), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Fellow Traveller (1989), The Long Day Closes (1992), and An Awfully Big Adventure (1994). However, this is surely something of a self‐denying ordinance, especially when such a ‘national tradition’ and such a definition are in serious need of challenge. Indeed, Higson himself would seem to agree, arguing that to exclude The Wings of the Dove (1997), Chariots of Fire (1981), The Remains of the Day (1993) and Chaplin (1992) from discussions of heritage cinema would be problematic, since it implies that heritage always means elite heritage. It is as if past lives, values, lifestyles, and living conditions of ordinary people are somehow irrelevant to the present. It is as if memories and representations of ordinary people, and the display of artefacts that yield insights into their lives, are somehow not part of the national heritage … The national heritage is a rich, and richly hybrid, set of experiences and should not be reduced to the apparently singular experiences of elite, conservative patriotism; nor should it be reduced to the values of consumerism. Heritage is not simply an elite version of the national past; the past can be and has been appropriated in all sorts of ways, many of which are central facets of popular culture. (2003, p. 35)

In this respect, Higson does mention a number of films dealing with rural and urban poverty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including The Innocent (1984), On the Black Hill (1987), The Rainbow (1988), Jude (1996), Tess (1979), The Woodlanders (1997), Little Dorrit (1987), and The Fool (1990), but he does so only en passant, and the films which receive the most detailed attention are ones which fall, albeit often in very differing ways, within the category of ‘heritage’ cinema as generally understood: for example, Chariots of Fire (1981) and Howards End (1992),



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on the one hand, and Edward II (1991) and Orlando (1992), on the other. Higson himself avers that ‘while my concern here has been to delineate a certain trend in “British” film production in the 1980 and 1990s, it seems at times as if the whole of the British film industry revolves around the heritage idea’ (2003, p. 36). However, it might be more accurate to claim that it is not so much the industry itself which revolves around that idea, but critical discourse on that cinema, and especially on those films set in the past in England. Indeed, even attempts to discuss other kinds of films by labelling them as ‘post‐heritage’ (for example, Claire Monk (1995) on Carrington (1995) and Orlando), or as ‘alternative heritage’ (Phil Powrie [2000]) on Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Small Faces (1995), and The Long Day Closes) work, perversely, to privilege ‘heritage’ as the dominant framework within which to view and analyse films set in England, and, as Higson himself admits, to suggest that ‘the elite heritage of the privileged classes is the core national heritage’ (2003, p. 35).

The Question of National Cinema At this point, it might be asked whether, in an era of globalisation and transnational cinema arrangements, it is still meaningful and useful to talk of national cinemas, let alone to seek to subdivide British cinema into its constituent national and regional parts. However, I would agree with John Hill when he argues that: It is quite possible to conceive of a national cinema, in the sense of one which works with or addresses nationally specific materials, which is none the less critical of inherited notions of national identity, which does not assume the existence of a unique or unchanging ‘national culture’, and which is quite capable of dealing with social divisions and differences. (1992 p. 16)

It may well be the case that up until the start of the 1980s most films made and set in England simply took the unity of the UK, and England’s place within it, for granted. But from then on, as Hill notes, when films addressed national concerns, they increasingly did so not in order to project a unified notion of national identity and national culture but in order to offer a much more fluid, hybrid, and plural sense of ‘Britishness’ than earlier British cinema generally did. In this respect, while the British cinema of the 1980s failed to assert the myths of ‘nation’ with its earlier confidence it was nevertheless a cinema that could be regarded as representing the complexities of ‘national’ life more fully than ever before. This acknowledgement of complexity was associated, moreover, with a growing sense of the variety of ‘national’ identities co‐existing within the British state. (Hill 1999, pp. 241–242)

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These, of course, comprised not only Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish identities, but also English identities – including various regional and local identities too, to which insufficient attention has been paid in discussion of films set in England. The present government’s apparent intention to devolve a certain amount of power to England’s larger cities may indeed be a cynical ploy to shift responsibility (and thus blame) for spending cuts onto the country’s beleaguered local authorities, but this should not be allowed to distract attention from the fact that there is a growing regional consciousness in England  –  partly fuelled by growing awareness of and anger at the distorting effects of London and the South‐ East on the nation’s economy (a phenomenon which, however, was noted as far back as the 1820s by William Cobbett, who termed London the ‘Great Wen’). As Blandford has argued, there is a need to create a more complex de‐centred vision – and not simply in geographical terms – of what the term ‘English cinema’ is capable of meaning, since if anything can be said to be at the heart of English film‐making in the last decade it is probably … the very different attempts to root films in English communities that themselves have distinctive and powerful characteristics and which therefore defy monolithic definitions of the English. These have variously consisted of actual ­geographic locations or, just as significantly, of communities defined by ethnicity or sexuality. (2007, pp. 19–20)

One should also add class and region. But this is an important corrective to the all‐too‐common assumption that the qualities associated with Englishness in cinema (and indeed in culture in general) are essentially reactionary, class‐bound and backward‐looking, and those associated with Britishness are, potentially at least, more modern, inclusive and progressive. For example, Paul Dave argues that: The ‘containing’ role of the English culture of class  –  its attempt to direct our ­understanding of the national past and present in particular ways  –  still requires ­contesting, especially in an era in which an ethnically diverse, regionally specific, multinational, socially heterogeneous Britain is struggling to assert itself. (2006, p. xii)

Dave’s book is an extremely important attempt to analyse the ways in which images of Englishness affect our understanding of class, but, its title and the above comment notwithstanding, its discussions of individual films do tend to elide British and English in a way which tends to obscure its central argument  –  for example, the chapter on the ‘underclass’ focuses primarily on Trainspotting (1996), which is, of course, set mainly in Scotland. Andrew Higson takes a different approach from Hill to the question of national, and specifically English, cinema in his most recent book, Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. Again, the very title of the book is welcome in the present context, but nonetheless I want to take issue with certain aspects of its



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approach to its subject. Higson points out, as I have done at the start of this chapter, that ‘it’s very rare to speak of the English film industry, even if the majority of film‐related activity takes place in England’. But he then goes on to note that: Even then, much of the activity in England involves foreign and especially American films, much of it is sponsored by companies based elsewhere and much of it is undertaken in conjunction with filmmakers who are not English. Englishness in cinema is thus profoundly caught up in the changing circumstances of nationalism, transnationalism and ‘globalisation’. Indeed, most national cinemas are now a complex amalgam of often competing local, national and international forces. What is variously called English cinema, British cinema, or the UK film industry is equally complex, and in many ways difficult to pin down or define precisely. That complexity and imprecision are the product of the diversity of indigenous English and broader British cultural traditions and identities and the marked social and cultural changes that have taken place since the Second World War; but [are] also the product of industrial development, market aspirations and government policy. (2011, p. 5)

This is undoubtedly the case at an industrial level, and at the related level of government policy towards the film industry, which is regulated in various ways across the UK as whole. But the question remains of whether it is possible to speak in any meaningful ways of culturally English films  –  that is, as Higson puts it, ‘films that are in some way self‐consciously engaging with English culture’ (2011, p. 25) – and, if so, to ask in what ways such films are indeed culturally English. Higson’s answer to this question is a complex one. He argues that because so many films ‘thematise Englishness and its variants, feature English places, characters and traditions and draw on English literary properties, they can be thought of as elements in a national cinema’ (2011, p. 36). These are usually prestigious and well‐known titles, such as the Harry Potter and Bond franchises, or adaptations from Jane Austen and E.M. Forster, which often enjoy global success. Other films with English settings may do less to thematise Englishness in an explicit fashion, that is they adopt national characteristics or iconographies which are so much part of everyday life, that they are taken for granted by many people, but, as Higson argues, ‘they can still establish a sense of a distinctive national space and reinforce ideas of English identity’ (2011, p. 37).

Culturally English Film‐making in the Global Marketplace However, Higson goes on to argue that ‘in a global film culture and film business, the national is a set of values and identities that can be exploited by a range of companies and enjoyed by a range of audiences, regardless of any national ­allegiances’ (2011, p. 98). In this view of things, culturally specific film‐making is a

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cultural marker, a means of signifying difference and distinctiveness in a global film market saturated with products: Culturally English filmmaking is a local, a national, a transnational and a global enterprise. Within the complex world of film production, it is a niche practice, in which the representation of various versions of Englishness provides an element of diversity and difference within the global film business; that is one aspect of the cultural value of national cinema. (2011, p. 253)

Higson isolates three dominant iconographies or mises‐en‐scène of Englishness. First, ‘traditional heritage England; that, is a pre‐industrial, semi‐rural version of England, a nation of small villages and grand houses scattered about a green and pleasant land’ (2011, p. 81) – for example Black Beauty (1994) and Brideshead Revisited (2008). Second, ‘mundane urban modernity, or perhaps the urban village’ (2011, p. 81), a very wide category (in my view, unhelpfully so) containing films as diverse as Last Orders (2001), The Full Monty (1997), Oliver Twist (2005), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), and Dirty Pretty Things (2002). And, finally, ‘monumental metropolitan modernity, which is perhaps exclusively about an internationally recognisable version of London, rather than anywhere else in England’ (2011, p. 82), as in Match Point (2005) and Notting Hill (1999). Higson concludes that, at one level, these iconographies have become ‘overdetermined stereotypes of Englishness’, but, at another, they are able to ‘operate as indicative backdrops, subtly ­meaningful narrative spaces for the playing out of dramas that thereby become recognisably English’ (2011, p. 253). He also argues that it is possible, at least to an extent, to categorise the different regimes of national identity displayed in films that are in various ways about England, English characters or English history according to ‘where the creative and financial control lies, the size of the production budget, and therefore the type of production, the mode of address, and the audience aimed at’. Thus, in the case of big‐budget blockbusters, such as the Bond and Harry Potter franchises, the dominant version of Englishness on offer tends to draw on upper‐class English traditions of aristocratic wealth, Establishment politics and private school education. Given the success of these films, this is evidently an eminently bankable version of Englishness. The process by which these traditional, class‐specific identities are further defined through their contrasts with various categories of otherness leads to an emphasis on archetypal ‘white’ English characters, pitted against stereotypical national characters. (2011, pp. 27–28)

In the case of medium‐budgeted films, the financial input, creative control, and mode of address are more varied, and the films encompass various mainstream popular genres such as rom‐coms, classic adaptations, and gangster films. Precisely because of the range of films included, this category is, as Higson admits, more



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difficult to define in terms of class and ethnicity, although he does note a tendency to focus on ‘the identities and traits of the white, English, London‐oriented middle and upper classes’ (2011, p. 28). Low budget films tend to be funded mainly from UK sources, to ‘concentrate much more on local places, characters and identities’, to ‘challenge traditional representations of national identity and explore hybrid and/or local identities’, and ‘often provocatively refigure the national as complex, hybrid and changing’ (2011, p. 29).

Englishness‐for‐Export Although much of Film England is greatly to be welcomed as an attempt to isolate what constitutes the Englishness of a large number of films classed as British for regulatory purposes, there are, in my view at least, two major problems with the approach which it takes. First, it appears to be relatively unconcerned about the nature of the versions of Englishness created by English film‐makers funded by US producers/distributors with their eyes fixed firmly on the export market. Higson does admit that such arrangements do not always result in films providing new visions of Englishness; on the contrary, in order to be successful in the global marketplace, culturally English film‐making will at times rely on the most familiar, established traditions and ­identities (2011, p. 247)

Many would argue, however, that what too often results is not the familiar and the established but the clichéd, the bland, and the ersatz. An all‐white Notting Hill in the 1999 film of the same name is the most obvious example, but the way in which the brutal running‐down of the steel and coal industries by the Conservatives is simply relegated to the background of The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000) respectively is another. Higson argues that these two films show that US investment ‘has in fact enabled a certain diversity of representations’ (2011, p. 249), and while these are indeed different from the representations of Englishness in, say, films based on novels by Jane Austen, the question remains of their adequacy and indeed truthfulness in a cultural sense. The problem is, as Mike Wayne has observed, that because Hollywood dominates British cinema not just at the level of production but also distribution and exhibition, this means effectively that ‘for British film‐ makers to get decent access to their own home market, the films have to take a detour through the American market and indeed are made with that market primarily in mind’ (2006, p. 63), which is bound to have consequences for the way in which England and the English are represented to themselves in such films – something which is no less concerning simply because many of these films happen to be popular with domestic audiences.

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The second problem is that although the book’s subtitle is ‘Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s’, the range of films with which it deals in any detail is actually pretty narrow. For example, films set in the past, distant or more recent, loom large here, but, as Higson himself notes, the roughly 220 films made between 1990 and 2009 and set in the past in Britain as a whole account for only 12% of UK films in this period (2011, p. 192). Yet, no less than two of the book’s eight chapters are devoted to Jane Austen, although one of these does admittedly ­discuss Bride and Prejudice (2004). This has consequences in terms of the versions of Englishness in culturally English film‐making which are presented by the book, because as Higson himself admits: England does become a far more culturally and socially diverse space in representations of the very recent past. In effect, such films present a new, more democratic vision of England, with their narratives more frequently placing poor, working‐class or underprivileged characters in the foreground, and giving room to ethnicities beyond the white Anglo‐Saxon. (2011, p. 243)

Such films, and, equally, those set in the present, which are generally low‐budget and small‐scale, tend effectively to demythologise the versions of England and Englishness frequently encountered in films set in the more distant past. Examples cited include Young Soul Rebels (1991), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Let Him Have It (1991), Anita and Me (2002), Vera Drake (2004), Control (2007), Bullet Boy (2004), Brassed Off (1996), and This Is England (2006). According to Higson: In most of the films about the very recent past, the local dimension will remain just that; the very specific, localised Englishness of the setting and the subject matter will thus remain at a banal, mundane level, unremarked and unremarkable (even if much effort has been put into creating this mundane historical setting). Language and mise‐en‐scène may establish the films as culturally English, but because the social types represented on screen are from different class, ethnic and cultural milieux to those familiar from so many films set in earlier English pasts, because the protagonists are rarely well‐established historical figures, and because the stories have not emerged from the pages of canonical literature, it is an Englishness that depends much less on established myths of nationhood and national identity. (2011, pp. 244–245)

However, I would contend that it is precisely in the everyday, taken‐for‐granted aspects of these films, and of such films set in the present too, that their dimensions of Englishness lie. As Claire Monk (2011b) has observed, the book’s subtitle ‘Culturally English Filmmaking’ could perfectly well suggest a focus on ‘low ­budgets, representational or aesthetic risk‐taking and a sensibility attuned to specifics of region and place – or equally, untold stories and a fresh approach to the popular’ whereas what it tends to deliver is a study of ‘the hegemonic, US‐backed Englishness‐for‐export of Jane Austen or Harry Potter’ and a ‘disproportionate



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overload of Austen, big‐budget Englishness for export and representations of the past in general’. Higson himself argues that: Across historical and contemporary dramas, there is a great diversity of English characters, yet a Southern/Home Counties version of white, middle‐class and upper‐class Englishness remains dominant. In films, this is a character type with a distinctive accent, which resonates powerfully from the sixteenth century to the ­present. (2011, p. 251)

I would argue, however, that what is dominant is a certain way of conceptualising films about and set in England, and that Film England is a good example of this tendency. This is certainly not to disparage Film England, whose strengths are considerable, but simply to point out that, like English Heritage, English Cinema, it is primarily an analysis of a certain kind of culturally English film‐making and not of culturally English film‐making per se.

Conclusion As New Labour discovered to its cost when, in its early days in power, it attempted to ‘rebrand’ Britain, Britishness is an extremely slippery concept. Englishness, though clearly contested, is nonetheless capable of being defined in more specific terms. It is my contention that if films set in England were analysed in terms of how they represent Englishness rather than Britishness, if the full panoply of such films was taken into account, and if the heritage prism was laid aside, except in cases in which it was appropriate to use it, the results might be not only culturally revealing but politically significant in the present conjuncture. In terms of the film culture this means challenging the ‘writing machine’ which has largely submerged English cinema within and subordinated it to British cinema, and which, on the rare occasions when it has considered the former, has tended to do so through the ‘heritage’ lens. This entails both looking at familiar films in fresh ways, and discovering overlooked and undervalued ones which are significant for the revealing light which they shed on the matter of Englishness. In part, this is simply a matter of shifting the angle from which one views films from British to English. At the start of this chapter I indicated that this approach had been productively adopted by Charles Barr in the case of Hitchcock, and David Pirie and Jonathan Rigby when it comes to horror cinema. One should also add Michael O’Pray, whose book on Derek Jarman is subtitled Dreams of England, and who points out that ‘Jarman is part of a long line of English radicals whose work has embraced a form of Romantic conservatism  –  William Blake, William Morris and, much closer to his own aspirations and times, the film‐maker Michael Powell’ (1996, p. 8).

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Figure 25.2  ‘A specifically English film’: A Canterbury Tale (1944).

And, of course, Powell himself has been discussed as a specifically English film‐ maker: for example by Ian Christie, who places Powell (and Pressburger) in ‘the outsider tradition to which they belong  –  a proud, popular tradition that runs from Bunyan and Blake, through Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling and Chesterton, Wells and Shaw’ (1985, pp. 19–20), and also by Andrew Moor, who analyses A Canterbury Tale (1944) in particular as a specifically English film (2005, pp. 85–118) (Figure 25.2). But it is also a way of opening up discussion of films which have been either marginalised, or indeed largely ignored, in writing about films made in England. After all, although Alan Lovell (2001) has claimed that British cinema is now the ‘known cinema’, Ian Christie, rather more convincingly, has pointed out that 90% of British films remain ‘unseen’ or ‘not talked about’ (quoted in Hill 2010, p. 308). Thus, there is still a great deal of the ‘lost continent’ left to explore, even if, as Hill quite rightly argues, the old realism/fantasy opposition has by now long outlived its usefulness. It would be far too glib to argue that one needs simply to concentrate on the kinds of films ignored or glossed over by Higson, so let me conclude simply by suggesting just four subjects for further research which might benefit from an approach which concentrates on the Englishness of the films concerned: 1. Films made in England that express a sense of English regional identity. A good example of this kind of approach is provided by Jack Newsinger’s work on Shane Meadows in the context of regional production centres (2013)



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Figure 25.3  English regional identity: This Is England (2006).

(Figure 25.3). Although the Regional Screen Agencies discussed by Newsinger were shut down in 2010 by the Conservative‐Liberal Democrat coalition, which may well make regionally based production more difficult, this doesn’t necessarily invalidate the usefulness of such an approach. It would also be interesting to focus on films shot in specific English cities  –  for example, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Birmingham, as opposed to the usual concentration on London. 2. ‘Daily Mail’ cinema. In complete contradistinction to social‐realist films in which working‐class characters are generally represented with sympathy and understanding, there is a growing number of films in which they, and especially young working‐class people, are represented as ‘chavs’ and ‘feral’, representations which are frequently amplified and endorsed by press comment on the films. Examples include Eden Lake (2008), Heartless (2009), Harry Brown (2009), Cherry Tree Lane (2010), F (2010), Community (2012), Comedown (2012), and Citadel (2012). These films have been ably discussed in the context of horror cinema by Johnny Walker (2016, pp. 85–108), but there is much more to say, not least about how these relate to the more reactionary forms of Englishness discussed above. Indeed, Walker and Sarah Godfrey have begun just a discussion in their analysis of the Danny Dyer phenomenon, and class‐ inflected critical reaction to it, which, as they argue, ‘provide a highly productive site for investigating broader questions of social identity’ in contemporary society (2015, p. 117). 3. The English landscape. This has been copiously written about in ‘heritage’ terms, but has received far less attention in others. David Pirie (2009, pp. 28–31, 171–175) has written perceptively on landscape in Quatermass II (1956) and Witchfinder General (1967), and Peter Hutchings (2004) has contributed a

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valuable tour d’horizon of the uncanny landscape in film and television, but this is really only a beginning. In terms of the contemporary landscape, Paul Dave (2006) devotes a welcome chapter to Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space (1997) and The Dilapidated Dwelling (2002); its title, ‘The Problem of England: Aesthetics of the Everyday’ is enormously suggestive of the kinds of work which, I would argue, need to be done on English films. Keiller himself has written a fascinating commentary on Robinson in Space (Keiller 1999), but what would be really welcome would be a study of the English landscape via the English road movie from Radio On (1979), Butterfly Kiss (1995), Gallivant (1996), London Orbital (2002), and An English Journey (2004) through to Sightseers (2012), one that, in particular, fully engaged with the growing literature on English edgelands and non‐places.2 4. Grim down South. Thanks to Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane (2009), we now have a remarkably detailed map of the British ‘B’ film from the Second World War to the 1960s. But apart from the two chapters ‘Britain in the B’s’ and ‘The Best of the B’s’ there is not a great deal of discussion of the actual contents of films themselves. And yet, as Chibnall points out elsewhere: ‘While critical attention has been focused on a handful of contemporary New Wave films that show the ripples of change spreading [in the 1960s] to the working class communities of the Northern provinces’, there are other films, usually made and set in the South, and particularly London, which ‘may be thought to lie outside the privileged category of social realist cinema’ but which ‘offer invaluable insights to cultural historians interested in the ambivalent responses to the social and economic transformations of the early 1960s’ (1999, p. 108). These included both ‘A’ films such as The Criminal (1960) and The Informers (1963) and the kind of ‘B’ features produced by small studios such as Butcher’s and Merton Park. Most of the ‘A’ features have received their due thanks to writers such as Chibnall and Robert Murphy, but the same most certainly cannot be said of many ‘B’ features which, especially those featuring location shooting, provide fascinating and revealing glimpses of a certain kind of England at the time – in particular, the shots of suburbia (conveniently close to the studios, of course) are frequently evocatively dreary and oppressive. Indeed, even as a child (OK, I was precocious), I was often struck by how similar was the environment of the ‘B’ feature to the one outside the cinema, whereas that of the ‘A’ feature was metaphorically, and frequently literally, a foreign country.

Notes 1 With acknowledgements to Will Self for the sub‐title. 2 Neil Archer (2018) has written an essay on this very subject, entitled ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Precarious Romanticism and the English Road Movie’.



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Trainspotter’s Delight Issues and Themes in Scottish Film Criticism Jonathan Murray

Introduction Any survey of critical debates around Scottish cinema needs to remember that things are sometimes better than they at first seem. Possibly the earliest extant example of academic Scottish film criticism inaugurated that intellectual tradition by mourning a glaring absence‐cum‐aberrance at the heart of national cultural identity and activity: for most of the twentieth century, it was argued, ‘there has not been a mixing of the chemistry of filmmaking with the other strands of culture’ (Anon. 1969, p. 5). It would be far harder to claim so some five decades on. Albeit in fits and starts, Scottish filmmakers have steadily tackled the historic lack of indigenous production infrastructure that provoked director Douglas Eadie to ask, as late as August 1979, ‘When is there going to be a real Scottish film?’ Since then, internationally fêted artists such as Bill Forsyth, Peter Mullan, and Lynne Ramsay, not to mention notable commercially and/or critically successful films as varied as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, GB, 1996), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, GB/ Den, 2006), and Sunshine on Leith (Dexter Fletcher, GB, 2013), have answered that question in many different ways. The relative proliferation of cinematic answers to Eadie’s late‐1970s question has, in turn, provoked escalating levels of critical response. Between 2009 and mid‐2015, for instance, no fewer than five new books on Scottish cinema appeared (Murray et  al. 2009; Martin‐Jones 2009; Meir 2014; Murray 2015; Nowlan and Finch 2015). This is a very different situation from that which held prior to the early 2000s. Granted, several significant collective initiatives were witnessed ­during the preceding three decades: a 1976 Scottish cinema special issue of the New Edinburgh Review; the seminal Scotch Reels anthology (McArthur 1982a); the A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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comparably important edited volume From Limelight to Satellite (Dick 1990); and the relatively brief (c. 1981–1988) flurry of local moving image scholarship published by the then‐influential Scottish cultural journal Cencrastus (see, for example, Bain et al. 1983; Craig 1983). Fundamentally, however, the period between Colin McArthur’s first major forays into Scottish film criticism (McArthur 1976) and Duncan Petrie’s second monograph (2004a) on the subject was largely defined by these two central figures’ Stakhanovite solo scholarship. McArthur and Petrie’s dominance of the field between the mid‐1970s and mid‐ 2000s was, to some degree, a matter of undeniable ubiquity. The former published no fewer than 34 works on Scottish cinema over that time, including the books Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (McArthur 2003a) and Whisky Galore! and The Maggie (McArthur 2003b). During the same period, Petrie augmented his monograph Screening Scotland (2000a) with a further 11 publications possessed of an extensive or exclusive Scottish element (for full details, see Murray 2004a, pp. 103–109; 144–147). But McArthur and Petrie’s influence was also a matter of significantly uncontested critical authority. Even when other authors advanced different views, they usually did so via explicit/ extended reference to the central ideas of Scottish film criticism’s two leading lights (see, for instance, Dick 1994; Craig 1996, pp. 82–188). The result was often paradoxically incremental in impact: a collective attempt to advance debate by acknowledging duopoly, a recurrent coming not to praise Caesar but bury him – and then exhume the illustrious corpse so that it could be reinterred time and time again. Only in the decade since the 2005 publication of a dossier (edited by Petrie) of Scottish cinema‐themed essays in the journal Screen (see Goode 2005; Martin‐Jones 2005; Murray 2005a; Neely 2005) has the field approached something like a significant and sustainable diversity of independent critical voices and agendas. The Screen dossier ‘help[ed]… initiate a new cycle of debate and discussion’ (Petrie 2005, p. 216) in several ways. First, it offered early publication opportunities to several scholars who worked widely on Scotland during the succeeding decade (see, for example, Goode 2007a, 2007b; Martin‐Jones 2007, 2014; Murray 2007, 2011; Neely 2008, 2009). This in turn encouraged other younger scholars to add to the expanding conversation (Hutcheson 2012, 2014; Meir 2009, 2011; Munro 2014). Lastly, the Screen dossier also broadened the terms of debate, rather than simply increasing the number of active debaters. Increased critical interest in the diverse range of national and international cultural traditions that influence Scottish cinema (Murray 2005a) and local films and filmmakers’ ability to explore many subjects over and above Scottish national identity (Goode 2005, Martin‐Jones 2005) are, for example, contemporary critical trends to which this chapter returns. The late 2010s, therefore, seem a good point at which to examine Scottish film criticism’s historical evolution. In what follows here, debates past and present are categorised under three thematic headings. The first, ‘Detachment, Depression, and Dreaming’, emphasises Scottish film criticism’s traditionally

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distanced relationship to British cinema studies. This is so not least because many Scottish critics have taken totalising accounts of Scottish cultural history and identity as their primary point of critical orientation and inspiration. The second, ‘Definition and Development’, underscores the prominence of pragmatic questions of how best to secure, and then succour, a sustainable indigenous production base. The rise of this collective critical characteristic was perhaps inevitable within long‐term consideration of a cinema as historically underdeveloped as Scotland’s has been. The last, ‘Deconstruction and Devolution’, explores the changing ways in which critics have analysed films representing Scotland, whether produced by native ­artists or not. Ongoing arguments about the relative centrality (or otherwise) of national identity politics to the work of textual analysis are of particular importance here.

Detachment, Depression, and Dreaming Discussing Scottish film criticism within an anthology surveying parallel British and Irish debates more generally can feel both welcome and weird. Such mixed feelings spring from the fact that much Scottish cinema scholarship has proven curiously detached from neighbouring film cultural and industrial contexts. Similarly, British cinema studies has seemed comparably uninterested in specifically Scottish concerns. There are, of course, significant exceptions to that rule. John Caughie, John Hill, and Duncan Petrie, for example, have all looked at (and frequently linked) developments on either side of the border, combining Scottish work (Caughie 1990, 2007; Hill 1982, 2009; Petrie 1996, 2000b) with influential pan‐British equivalents (Caughie 2000; Hill 1999; Petrie 1991). But such achievements resonate in part because they are rare. For the most part, Scottish and British cinema scholars have failed to follow Caughie, Hill, and Petrie’s lead. Indeed, British film criticism’s infrequent incursions into Scottish territory have often tended to downplay (Kuhn 2008) or robustly interrogate (Street 2009) the idea that  issues of national cultural specificity and identity demand extended critical attention. This latter phenomenon begs some attempt at explanation. On the one hand, non‐Scottish scholars’ apparent disengagement can perhaps be traced to a wider caution, increasingly visible within British cinema studies from the mid‐ 1990s on, regarding the utility of critical models predicated on notions of national culture and identity, ‘the question of … whether the national in national cinema always invokes the myth of consensus’ (Higson 1995, p. 273). This interpretative‐cum‐ideological wariness has, arguably, encouraged two (if not more) distinctive strains within recent British film scholarship. On one hand, some ­influential work argues from first principles, asking whether ‘the national’ has become a fatally compromised analytical category, one incapable of doing justice



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to the industrial and cultural complexity of film production in the twenty‐first century (see, for example, Higson 2000a; 2000b). Alternatively, other recent research adopts a more pragmatic approach, seeing unitary forms of Britishness as an especially problematic (because historically imperialist) example of national identity politics. Such work therefore predicates itself upon a more localised focus on cultural ideas and articulations of Englishness instead (see, for example, Barr 1999; Higson 2003, 2010; Dave 2006). Such shifts within British cinema scholarship possibly discouraged widespread critical engagement with an emergent Scottish cinema just at the point when filmmaking became an increasingly sustainable and significant component part of cultural production north of the border. On the other hand, post‐1990 Scottish film critics’ analogous relative lack of interest in analysing wider British issues and debates possibly relates to a widespread and p­ ersistent local perception that Scotland’s filmic identity and activity have never been well served by the economically and culturally overbearing influence of a London‐based chain of cinematic command. As early as 1938, for instance, producer John Grierson complained of what he saw as Scotland’s ‘poor relation’ status, ‘depending … on the good graces of London producers’. Three decades later, Grierson (1968) was still advancing a thesis of state‐sponsored unequal ­cinematic development (‘we are thwarted in the expression of these intangibles by which we live and move and have our being’) just as academic Scottish film c­ riticism began to coalesce as a distinctive local intellectual tradition. This mutual stand‐off represents a missed opportunity in many ways. Scottish film criticism’s tendency to ignore the work that local filmmakers have undertaken outside Scotland, but within the wider United Kingdom, seems puzzling when one considers the marked influence of figures such as John Grierson (Caughie 1986) and Colin Young (Petrie 2004b) over the development of British cinema. It has also resulted in notably lopsided accounts of peripatetic Scottish directorial careers like those of, say, Bill Douglas (Figure 26.1) or Gillies MacKinnon. Elsewhere, the full extent of Scottish filmmakers’ contributions to British film culture since the 1970s – think of creative voices as distinctive and varied as those of Douglas, Bill Forsyth, Peter Mullan, or Lynne Ramsay – has perhaps not been as fully or regularly acknowledged as might have been the case. Scholars from other parts of Britain often tend, it seems, to subconsciously cede such work to their Scottish peers. Scottish film criticism’s semi‐detached status within British and Irish cinema studies has also resulted in a disappointing lack of research comparing Scotland with the Atlantic archipelago’s other constituent national cinemas. Steve Blandford (2007) and Jeffrey Richards (1997) aside, no critic has really extended a speculative mid‐1990s/early‐2000s experiment, conducted by Martin McLoone and others, in laying the ground for a comparative analysis of contemporary non‐English British cinemas’ parallel attempts ‘to re‐imagine the periphery [and…] the very notion of Britain itself ’ (McLoone 2001, p. 186; see also Hill et al. 1994), whether in the past or at the new millennium’s advent. While discussion of Scotland and the Republic

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Figure 26.1  A distinctive Scottish voice: Bill Douglas’ My Childhood (1972).

of Ireland has fared somewhat better (McArthur 1998; Murray 2004b, 2005b; Neely 2004), a consistently and comprehensively nuanced comparative analysis of the different cinemas of Britain and Ireland still remains to be achieved. What little comparative work does exist often adopts a broad‐brush polemical approach, ­citing another British or Irish cinema as infinitely more advanced and aware, industrially and/or ideologically speaking, than the near neighbour from/of which a given critic speaks. The grass is always greener, in other words: this kind of comparative study can just as easily produce a despairing form of self‐castigation as it can a nuanced sense of how, when, and why to learn productive lessons from the example of other local peers (Murray 2005b, p. 156). But comparative critical work is urgently needed because of the increasingly devolved nature of the British and Irish screen industries. That ongoing phenomenon encompasses developments such as recent moves to establish and sustain major studio facilities in Cardiff (Denholm‐Hall 2014) and Belfast (Coleman 2014). Increasingly acute Scottish awareness of such issues has so far tended to assume a depressingly familiar kind of un‐nuanced self‐laceration (Brooks 2015). A more considered critical approach to the study of neighbouring film cultures and histories has the capacity to produce valuable new ideological and industrial insights. Adumbrating a map of critical roads not taken by scholars of Scotland begs an identification of the routes that these researchers have pursued instead. Scottish



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film criticism’s development has been shaped by the fact that successive generations of researchers located both their object of study and the conclusions they drew about it within wider attempts to construct universalising theories and accounts of modern Scottish cultural history and identity per se. The pioneering Scotch Reels anthology, for instance, opened by opining that it was impossible to consider ‘the limitations of Scottish film culture separately from the problems of Scottish culture as a whole’ (McArthur 1982b, p. 1). The central influence behind that position was historian Tom Nairn’s 1977 monograph The Break‐Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo‐Nationalism, a work that Scotch Reels’ introduction actively foregrounded as having ‘resonances throughout this volume’ (McArthur 1982b, p. 1). Nairn did not paint a pretty picture. Scotland’s allegedly self‐colonising acquiescence in the 1707 Union of Parliaments had resulted, he argued, in an extraordinarily contaminated and compromised modern national culture and identity, a ‘remarkable assemblage of heterogeneous elements, neurotic double‐binds, falsely honoured shades and brainless vulgarity’ (Nairn 1981, p. 168). Such profound pessimism looms large over perhaps the best‐known single passage in Scotch Reels, Colin McArthur’s coruscating denunciation of a Scottish cinema‐cum‐national culture hardly worth the name: Scotland [my emphasis] has produced no equivalents of Syberberg’s, Bertolucci’s, Angelopoulous’, Alverez’s and Mulloy’s treatments of their respective national histories; no equivalents of Godard’s, Oshima’s or Makavejev’s anatomising of the sexual mores of the societies in which they live; no equivalents of the sustained reflection on the processes of cinema evident in the work of Snow and Straub/ Hillet. (McArthur 1982c, p. 67)

Although subsequently much‐contested, McArthur’s deliberate binding together of Scottish cinema with Scottish culture per se established an enduring critical precedent. For many subsequent scholars, speaking of Scottish cinema has been inextricably linked to a simultaneous need to express a view on the potentialities afforded by modern Scottish culture and identity as a whole. That phenomenon is clearly visible, for instance, in the work of Duncan Petrie, the only scholar who can to date claim comparable critical influence to that wielded by McArthur. On one hand, Petrie has noted his wish to challenge many aspects of the Scotch Reels project, ‘reassess[ing] the legacy of cinematic representation in a less overtly negative light’ (Petrie 2005, p. 215). As a result, his monograph Screening Scotland concludes that: The emergence of a distinctive Scottish cinema has been just one element of the rich and diverse fermentation of creativity and cultural expression in Scotland … that has done so much to forge a new culture of possibility. (Petrie 2000a, p. 226)

At first sight, this early‐2000s position could hardly seem more different from its early‐1980s antecedent. But, like McArthur, Petrie deliberately and deeply links his

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view of Scottish cinema to a perception of Scottish culture taken as a whole. Moreover, like Scotch Reels, Petrie’s work also advertises (Petrie 2005, p. 214) its profound debt to contemporaneous, totalising accounts of modern Scottish cultural history, in this case, the work of Scottish literary historian and theoretician Cairns Craig (1996, 1999). One of the original contributors to the Scotch Reels anthology, Craig recanted vehemently afterwards, coming to see Scotch Reels as a prime example of Scottish intellectual nostophobia associated with the self‐hating ‘ideology of the cultural establishment’ (Craig 2009, p. 65). Craig’s celebratory understanding of a self‐confident and assertive post-1707 Act of Union Scottish literary tradition clearly distinct from its metropolitan British counterpart encouraged Petrie to develop a similar analysis of post‐1990 Scottish cinema more specifically (Petrie 2004a, p. 11). Scottish cinema criticism’s traditionally dominant intellectual alignment with Scottish cultural studies more generally, therefore, has proved a mixed blessing. On one hand, it would be perverse not to acknowledge cinema’s importance within the expression and investigation of Scottish national identity during the last four decades or so (see, for example, McArthur 2003a; Petrie 2004a). It is also clear that detailed awareness of the wider field of Scottish cultural studies has granted a powerful sense of impetus and inspiration to much Scottish film critical work. But this affiliation has perhaps precluded a fully productive integration of Scottish debates and agendas within British and Irish cinema studies as a whole. It has also discouraged Scottish critics from widespread exploration of other possible (and non‐national) conceptual and methodological models. More cosmopolitan critical manoeuvres, such as David Martin‐Jones’ (2009) consideration of the anthropological concept of autoethnography within his work on Scottish film, remain relatively rare and tentative in nature.

Definition and Development Turning to industrial and institutional concerns, for most of the twentieth century Scottish film criticism was shaped by the sense that it was a paradoxical beast: a school of national cinema scholarship in search of a national cinema to critique. Mid‐century perceptions of near‐wholesale indigenous cinematic disenfranchisement – ‘Hollywood and London, with a few exceptions, have presented the Scot’ (Anon. 1946, p. 3) – remained firmly in place nearly half‐a‐century later. Early‐1990s observers asked whether it was ‘really possible to look forward to the growth of a national cinema when the number of indigenous films produced … in the last five years has averaged just under two a year’ (Meech and Kilborn 1992, p. 257). The 1993 HMSO Charter for the Arts in Scotland could apprehend only ‘a massive hole at the centre of the [local] industry where feature film production should be’ (p. 29). Low historical levels of indigenous feature production readily explain the persistence of this local pessimism. Between 1972 and 2002, a mere 44 features with



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significant elements of both Scottish theme and creative or financial input received British theatrical distribution, a measly average of a film‐and‐a‐half per year for the period (see McBain 1990; Petrie 2000a, pp. 227–228). Only between 1995 and 2000 did modest acceleration in production levels take place, with 18 Scottish features and 45 shorts made during that half‐decade alone. The situation facing pioneering critics at the start of the 1980s was, therefore, hardly propitious. By the end of the 1970s, locally based filmmakers had for the first time started to make feature work in Scotland. Bill Forsyth, for example, proudly (and plausibly) presented his micro‐ budget debut feature, That Sinking Feeling (GB, 1979), as ‘the first fiction narrative feature made by someone living in Scotland’ (Stein 1984, p. 55). But isolated individuals did not an industry make. Thus, while critical activity of the period did encompass work on early‐1980s Scottish films and filmmakers (see, for example, Glasgow Women and Film Collective 1983; McArthur 1983), the clear collective priority was very different. It related to the inescapable fact that ‘the discourses within which Scotland and the Scots have been represented in films… were deployed within production structures fashioned outside Scotland’ (McArthur 1982c, p. 66), primarily those associated with mainstream American and metropolitan British cinemas. The main result of this prioritisation was Scotch Reels’ development of the (in) famous critical taxonomy of Tartanry, Kailyard, and Clydeside. This triumvirate of representational traditions was understood to define the vast majority of cinematic images of Scotland and Scottishness. Tartanry’s Highland iconography and ideology characteristically focused on portrayals of historical events and personages associated with the two abortive Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Its preferred vision of Scottish identity was consequently pre‐modern, pre‐British, and tribal in nature. Kailyard’s classical manifestation was as a late‐nineteenth‐century, rural Lowland narrative mode, typically concerned with comic satirisation and/or valorisation of intensely parochial communities and world‐views projected onto Scottish identity as a whole. Finally, Clydesideism was a twentieth‐century urban (and, classically, Glasgow‐based) representational tradition given over to depictions of working‐class masculine identity and various forms of social conflict, whether political, physical, or psychological in nature. Subsequent critical work increasingly questioned this ambitious three‐part analytical schema. Many writers argue that, as indigenous production levels steadily increased from the early 1980s on, the Tartanry‐Kailyard‐Clydeside model applies to a far smaller proportion of Scottish and/or Scottish‐themed films than might arguably have been the case during earlier decades (Petrie 2000a, 2004a). Others propose that the model was always overly monolithic, ruthlessly ironing out the ideological particularities (Caughie 1990) or possibilities (Sillars 2009) visible within individual films that fall, to varying extents, within the Tartanry, Kailyard, or Clydeside traditions. Whatever one’s view of such arguments, it should be noted that Scotch Reels bequeathed a key legacy to later generations, one as under‐acknowledged as it is enduringly enabling. Early Scottish critics’ partially enforced – but, within the context of British cinema studies, relatively early – awareness of cinema as a profoundly

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transnational phenomenon remains of enduring value. Despite a steadily increasing volume of indigenous features to study, a significant proportion of 2000s Scottish film criticism has concerned itself with transnational issues and agendas (see, for instance, Brown 2011; Murray 2012) predicated on an axiom that the Scotch Reels writers would surely recognise cinematic ideas and images of a given place, and the institutional and industrial structures that enable these, do not emanate solely (or even primarily) from that place itself. Most notably of all, David Martin‐Jones ranges far and wide in his analyses, spanning Bollywood and the British social realism of Ken Loach so as to ‘not focus solely on films made by Scots, about Scots, for Scots’ (2009, p. 1) in his attempt to establish the boundaries of a contemporary Scottish cinematic canon. Thus, of the 22 post‐1990 features which Martin‐ Jones’ monograph Scotland: Global Cinema discusses, more than one‐third are mobile, rather than indigenous, productions, and more than half are directed by non‐resident, non‐Scottish filmmakers. Such critical approaches need to endure and expand in future because they accurately reflect the post‐millennial industrial realities of filmmaking in Scotland. For example, less than half (10) of the 28 Scottish features produced with indigenous public financial support between 1983 and 2000 were international co‐productions. But in a sample of 43 post‐2000 films that incorporate a significant degree of Scottish financial and/or creative involvement, the corresponding figure rises to 33 (see Murray 2012). Moreover, while 20 of the 28 indigenously supported 1980 and 1990s features were set locally, and 18 were directed by filmmakers Scottish by birth, the corresponding figures (17 and 11) for the post‐2000 movies are lower, despite the fact that the sample itself is more than twice the size of its pre‐2000 counterpart. Scottish cinema criticism’s originary status as a movement in search of a material object of study has also provoked an enduring strain of local research focused on institutional and industrial issues. Lacking an already‐existing indigenous feature cinema to critique, the Scotch Reels project considered how best to bring one into being. But the answer it proposed to that question, namely, the independent film and video workshop‐style fostering of ‘a cluster of oppositional strategies challenging dominant, ideologically loaded cinematic practices’ (McGill and McIntyre 1983, p. 36), brought early critics into sustained conflict with key domestic institutions  –  the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund  –  of the period. The latter organisations tended to view an emergent school of Scottish film criticism as a cuckoo in the nest, ‘its basic unspoken aim… the destruction of that pernicious capitalist product, the commercially produced feature film’ (Brown 1983, p. 37) at precisely the point in time when locally based filmmakers were enjoying their first realistic opportunities to create just such work. One consequence of the mutual suspicion that generally held sway between Scottish filmmakers and Scottish film critics prior to the 1990s involves the fact that comparatively little research has yet been done on the embryonic local institutional and industrial landscape before that time. It is worth noting the extent to



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which the Scotch Reels anthology simultaneously faced two ways with regard to questions of local film history. The fact that this publication possessed a substantial historical component  –  contributions within it explored the career of Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson’s long‐term collaborator and biographer (Caughie and McArthur 1982), leftist amateur filmmaking and film culture of the 1930s (Allen 1982), and the late‐1940s film adaptation of the 1946 Glasgow Unity Theatre play The Gorbals Story (Hill 1982) – is often forgotten today. Perhaps this is because, elsewhere in its pages, Scotch Reels also sweepingly asserted an alleged near‐total ‘institutional failure of Scottish film culture’ (McArthur 1982c, p. 68) prior to the 1980s. The resultant contradictory position was one within which a nuanced desire to talk about various aspects of Scottish film history was ultimately overshadowed by a more quotable conviction that Scottish film history offered relatively little worth talking about. Perhaps this is why comparatively few researchers have stepped into the breach since. The 1950s remain terra incognita, bar a few surveys of pioneering amateur filmmakers such as Enrico Cocozza and Margaret Tait (Miller 2002; Neely 2009; Neely and Riach 2009). The 1960s have only attracted one substantial investigation to date (Petrie 2013). The 1970s and 1980s make do with relatively little beyond some focused analyses of the production backgrounds to Bill Forsyth’s first three features (Murray 2011, pp. 9–17; 64–69; Meir 2014, pp. 25–40). A sustained account of Scottish film culture in the century before Shallow Grave (Boyle, GB, 1994) ought therefore to represent a major priority for future critical work (Figure 26.2). More positively, Scotch Reels’ pronounced (if pugnacious) interest in contemporary local industrial and institutional issues was continued and consolidated from

Figure 26.2  ‘New Scottish cinema’: Shallow Grave (1994).

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the 1990s on, as scholars developed John Caughie’s prescient observation that ‘the new questions for representing Scotland … are not simply critical and theoretical … but are also material and practical’ (1990, p. 30). Such scholarship has often proved markedly sympathetic in surveying evolving local institutional developments, not least because some critics had direct involvement within these (see, for instance, McIntyre 1994; Petrie 2007). Robin MacPherson’s experience as an independent producer and, subsequently, as a development executive with public film agency Scottish Screen, has, for example, resulted in a number of exceptionally nuanced accounts of industrial opportunities and obstacles facing modern‐day Scottish filmmakers (MacPherson 2009; 2010). Elsewhere, much of Duncan Petrie’s work is predicated on a belief that Scottish cinema criticism must acknowledge the extent to which ‘the necessary conditions for a sustainable national cinema require … certain structures and institutions that can enable films to be produced in a relatively consistent and regular basis’ (Petrie 2000b, p. 154). The most recent generation of scholars build further on this. Christopher Meir (2014) and Linda Hutcheson (2012; 2014) have undertaken extensive archival and interview‐based research on key local funding institutions such as Scottish Screen and Creative Scotland, breaking new ground in our understanding of the politics and pragmatics of Scottish feature film production past and present. Scottish film criticism’s consistent engagement with institutional and industrial questions has also proved of wider significance for British and Irish cinema studies. It is perhaps no accident that several of the most insightful and influential commentators (Caughie, Hill, Petrie) on these aspects of British and Irish film and television histories began their work in this area with a significant element of Scottish‐focused scholarship. Caughie’s frequently cited observation that ‘a relationship between art and organisation… may be one of the characteristics of British film production … an effect of the need continually to start again in the organisation of independence’ (1986, p. 200) perhaps stemmed, to some degree, from the experience of living in/ working on a part of the United Kingdom where, during the 1980s and before, that rule had necessarily been at the forefront of artists’ and analysts’ minds. Scotland’s prominent position as an important source of British film institutional and industrial research continues today. A study of the history of the UK Film Council (UKFC) (Doyle et al. 2015) represents the major result of a three‐year Arts and Humanities Research Council‐funded research project conducted at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cultural Policy Research.

Deconstruction and Devolution So far, this chapter has identified and discussed two major historical trends within Scottish film criticism. The first related to that tradition’s consistent interest in an  emergent national cinema’s place within Scottish culture more broadly.



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The second involved sustained consideration of the evolving late‐twentieth and early‐twenty‐first‐century industrial and institutional conditions for indigenous feature production. The influence of these agendas dictated the comparable long‐ term prominence of a third and final trend. This refers to a collective critical fascination, often tending towards frustration, with the ways in which individual films and filmmakers depict Scottish society, identity, and history. For successive generations of critics, the act of saying something about Scottish cinema has necessarily involved establishing what that cinema is understood to be saying about Scotland. From its earliest articulations, this critical project has often proved markedly prescriptive in character. Much post‐1980 Scottish film criticism typically works to position individual films at their ‘correct’ point along a range of closely related spectrums: the culturally authentic and inauthentic, the culturally accurate and inaccurate, the culturally enabling and disabling. The Scotch Reels project and many others since have seen an emergent Scottish cinema’s potential significance as rooted in the latter’s willingness to formulate new, locally informed (in all possible senses) representational discourses ‘adequate to the task of dealing with the reality of Scottish life’ (McArthur 1982b, p. 3). The near‐total industrial and ideological dominance, prior to the mid‐1990s, of externally produced images of Scotland – ‘a picture of a people losing control of their film representation from the word go’ (Michie 1986, p. 253)  –  compelled Scottish filmmakers and film critics to put something better (not least because truer) in that legacy’s place. This scholarly raison d’être held almost unchallenged sway within Scottish film criticism until the mid‐2000s. Although notably critical of many of the Scotch Reels project’s central tenets, for instance, Duncan Petrie framed the impetus of his work in similar terms, foregrounding the need to study ‘narrative‐based popular forms that provide the means by which the myths and realities … of Scotland and its inhabitants have been reflected and asserted, imagined and re‐imagined through a process of cultural transmission’ (2004a, pp. 1–2). Such priorities also propelled the work of younger scholars who joined the debate around the moment of Petrie’s major publications (Murray 2001, 2005a; Martin‐Jones 2004, 2005). The long‐term hegemony of questions of national identity within Scottish film criticism simultaneously extended and limited the field of scholarly enquiry. The stubborn pre‐eminence of one kind of critical question dictated a disproportionate collective focus on a limited number of Scottish films and filmmakers deemed amenable to answering it (Brown 2011). The result is that a striking number of local figures and features have attracted very little sustained attention to date. The 1980s Scotch Reels critics’ enthusiastic proselytising on behalf of an oppositional, artisanal, and avant‐garde national cinema yet to come into being caused them to largely overlook the much more mainstream indigenous activity of the period, films like Heavenly Pursuits (Charlie Gormley, GB, 1986) or Venus Peter (Ian Sellar, GB, 1989). The 1990 and 2000s saw only incremental improvement. Much recent critical work tends to cluster around a few films of unquestionable industrial significance – such as Trainspotting (see Calder 1996; O’Hagan 1996) – or that are clearly

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indebted to culturally prestigious international art cinema traditions  –  such as Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, GB/Can, 2002) (see Caughie 2007; Street 2009) – or that emerge from British filmmaking traditions conventionally understood to engage closely with local socio‐political issues and experience  –  such as Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach, GB/Ger/Sp, 2002) (see Rolinson 2005; Hill 2009). Since roughly 2005, however, critics have increasingly questioned national identity’s traditional pre‐eminence as the central reference point against which Scottish filmmaking ought to be analysed, arguing instead that: Both in terms of international working and co‐production arrangements and the representational content of much contemporary local feature work, what Scottish cinema is devolving itself away from is the notion that it must automatically be framed and best understood within any framework of national specificity at all. (Murray 2007, p. 90)

While this was perhaps a partly oedipal manoeuvre – younger writers distinguishing their critical voices from those of certain extensively published seniors – it also possessed an undeniably strong observational component. As Sarah Neely has noted, during the 2000s many Scottish filmmakers simply ‘g[o]t on with the business of making films that challenge the relevance of debates around [national] representation or, on occasion, sidestep them altogether’ (2008, p. 155). Thus, even when particular post‐2005 movies seem to facilitate a continuance of Scottish film criticism’s tendency to concentrate discussion on a handful of individual films and filmmakers, closer examination reveals a more protean picture. In the case of an increasingly canonical twenty‐first‐century Scottish text such as Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, for instance, critics have pursued a notably diverse range of non‐national analytical strategies. These range from consideration of gendered and sexual identities (Sillars and Macdonald 2008), through auteurist critique (Murray, 2016), transnational funding and production strategies (Murray 2015, pp. 78–110), to genre studies analysis (Stewart 2012). This extension of scholarly diversity should remain a priority for future work. On one hand, Scottish cinema criticism needs to uncover a comparative wealth of films and filmmakers hitherto obscured by the traditional dominance of questions associated with national identity politics. On the other hand, the already‐known Scottish cinema also needs to be revisited, in an attempt to think through non‐, sub‐, and/or post‐national ways to understand the work of figures like Bill Douglas, Bill Forsyth, Peter Mullan, Lynne Ramsay, and many more (see, for instance, Murray 2011, pp. 1–7). Of course, qualifying national identity politics’ traditional centrality within Scottish film criticism does not mean questioning it altogether. Recent decades have seen huge cultural and constitutional change within Scotland and the wider United Kingdom: it would be strange if much Scottish filmmaking did not contribute to, and find itself influenced by, that phenomenon. Contemporary works such as ’71 (Yann Demange, GB, 2014), produced and written by Scots Angus Lamont and



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Gregory Burke respectively, clearly foreground the complex and contested nature of British and Irish identities past and present. The story of a naïve British Army private caught behind enemy lines in early‐1970s Belfast, ’71 subjects an opening British Unionist assumption (‘You are not leaving this country’) to sustained scrutiny. Elsewhere, the romantic musical Sunshine on Leith could be read as an allegory of political indecision in Devolution‐era Scotland. Protagonists Rab (Peter Mullan) and Jean’s ( Jane Horrocks) marriage dates from the year (1988) of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly’s pioneering Claim of Right for Scotland. Twenty‐five years later, the couple confront a range of perplexing questions – ‘Why do we stay together? Is it habit? What if we’re too frightened to do anything else?’ – that resonate at the ballot box as well as in the bedroom. Indeed, increasing attention to popular genres (such as horror and romantic comedy) not traditionally seen as central to Scottish identity’s cinematic representation has become a prominent feature within recent critical work (Martin‐Jones 2007; Murray 2013; Murray 2015, pp. 143–174; Nowlan and Finch 2015).

Conclusion Viewed from a contemporary vantage point, the history of Scottish film criticism appears like a narrative of notable achievements and absences. Speaking positively, Scottish critics have placed the moving image at the heart of debates around national culture and identity north of the border. In doing so, they have developed illuminating accounts of many filmmakers, from Bill Douglas to Ken Loach, Bill Forsyth to Danny Boyle, who have made distinctive contributions to British cinema’s development since the early 1970s. Moreover, a number of Scottish scholars have also exerted notable influence over collective understanding of the institutional and industrial aspects of British and Irish cinema histories. This is so not least because those figures worked from (and with) a locally informed understanding of the importance of such considerations. Yet a remarkable range of periods and personnel within Scottish cinema’s story still await sustained attention. Rectifying that state of affairs will involve ongoing negotiation of the fact that Scottish film criticism’s traditional raison d’être, the exploration and evolution of national identity politics, does not on its own provide a sufficient rationale for the direction of future work. Finally, and perhaps most paradoxically of all, even as Scotland continues to consider exiting the United Kingdom, a closer integration of Scottish critical work with British and Irish equivalents remains an under‐explored possibility to date. If ‘the future of Scottish cinema is still in flux, [but] the future of academic discussions about it look positively rosy’ (Brown 2014), this is as much a matter of work still to do as one of work already done.

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Hill, John, McLoone, Martin, and Hainsworth, Paul (eds.) (1994). Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe. Belfast/London: Institute of Irish Studies in association with the University of Ulster and the British Film Institute. HMSO (1993). The Charter for the Arts in Scotland. Edinburgh: HMSO. Hutcheson, Linda (2012). Completion and distribution of Scottish screen‐funded films. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 5 (1). Available at: https://ijosts. ubiquitypress.com/articles/abstract/149/ (accessed 20 October 2018). Hutcheson, Linda (2014). Stimulating production activity in Scotland: Advance Party and the rule doctrine. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 7 (1). Available at: https://ijosts.ubiquitypress.com/articles/abstract/182/ (accessed 20 October 2018). Kuhn, Annette (2008). Ratcatcher. London: British Film Institute. MacPherson, Robin (2009). Shape‐shifters: independent producers in Scotland and the journey from cultural entrepreneur to entrepreneurial culture. In: Scottish Cinema Now (ed. Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman), 222–239. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. MacPherson, Robin (2010). ‘Is bigger better? Film success in small sountries: the case of Scotland, Ireland and Denmark’. Available at: http://researchrepository.napier.ac. uk/3752 (accessed 20 July 2015). Martin‐Jones, David (2004). Orphans, a work of minor cinema from post‐devolutionary Scotland. Journal of British Cinema and Television 1 (2): 226–241. doi:10.3366/ JBCTV.2004.1.2.226. Martin‐Jones, David (2005). Sexual healing: representations of the English in post‐devolutionary Scotland. Screen 46 (2): 227–234. doi:10.1093/screen/46.2.227. Martin‐Jones, David (2007). National symbols: Scottish national identity in Dog Soldiers. Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 7: 169–200. Martin‐Jones, David (2009). Scotland: Global Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Martin‐Jones, David (2014). Film tourism as heritage tourism: Scotland, diaspora and The Da Vinci Code (2006). New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (2): 156–177. doi: 10.1080/17400309.2014.880301. McArthur, Colin (1976). Politicising Scottish film culture. New Edinburgh Review 43 (2): 8–10. McArthur, Colin (ed.) (1982a). Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television. London: British Film Institute. McArthur, Colin (1982b). Introduction. In: Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (ed. Colin McArthur), 1–6. London: British Film Institute. McArthur, Colin (1982c). Scotland and cinema: the iniquity of the fathers. In: Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (ed. Colin McArthur), 40–69. London: British Film Institute. McArthur, Colin (1983). Tendencies in the new Scottish cinema. Cencrastus 13: 33–35. McArthur, Colin (1998). Artists and philistines: the Irish and Scottish film milieux. Journal for the Study of British Cultures 5 (2): 143–153. McArthur, Colin (2003a). Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. McArthur, Colin (2003b). Whisky Galore! and The Maggie. London: I.B. Tauris. McBain, Janet (1990). Scotland in feature film: a filmography. In: From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book (ed. Eddie Dick), 233–253. London/Glasgow: British FiIm/ Scottish Film Council.



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McGill, Brian and McIntyre, Steve (1983). Scottish film culture: the high road and the low road. Cencrastus 13: 36–37. McIntyre, Steve (1994). Vanishing point: feature film production in a small country. In: Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe (ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth), 88–111. Belfast/London: Institute of Irish Studies in association with the University of Ulster and the British Film Institute. McLoone, Martin (2001). Internal decolonisation? British cinema in the Celtic fringe. In: The British Cinema Book, 2e (ed. Robert Murphy), 184–190. London: British Film Institute. Meech, Peter and Kilborn, Richard (1992). Media and identity in a stateless nation: the case of Scotland. Media, Culture and Society 14 (2): 245–259. Meir, Christopher (2009). Chasing “cross‐over”: selling Scottish cinema to international audiences. In: Scottish Cinema Now (ed. Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman), 188–205. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Meir, Christopher (2011). On the art of “making movies happen”: an interview with Andrea Calderwood. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 4 (2). Meir, Christopher (2014). Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Michie, Alastair (1986). Scotland: strategies of centralisation. In: All our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (ed. Charles Barr), 252–270. London: British Film Institute. Miller, Mitch (2002). Heavenly mandates’. The Drouth Winter: 9–15. Munro, Robert (2014). Irvine Welsh and the adaptation industry: Filth, a case study. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 7 (2). Available at: https://ijosts. ubiquitypress.com/articles/abstract/136/ (accessed 20 October 2018). Murray, Jonathan (2001). Contemporary Scottish film. The Irish Review 28: 75–88. Murray, Jonathan (2004a). That Thinking Feeling: A Research Guide to Scottish Cinema. Glasgow/Edinburgh: Scottish Screen/Edinburgh College of Art. Murray, Jonathan (2004b). Convents or cowboys? In: National Cinemas and Beyond: Studies in Irish Film I (ed. Kevin Rockett and John Hill), 149–160. Dublin: Four Courts. Murray, Jonathan (2005a). Kids in America? Narratives of transatlantic influence in 1990s Scottish cinema. Screen 46 (2): 217–226. doi:10.1093/screen/46.2.217. Murray, Jonathan (2005b). Sibling rivalry? Contemporary Scottish and Irish cinemas. In: Scotland and Ireland: Culture and Society, 1707–2000 (ed. Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan), 144–163. Dublin: Four Courts. Murray, Jonathan (2007). Scotland. In: The Cinema of Small Nations (ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie), 76–92. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Murray, Jonathan (2011). Discomfort and Joy: The Cinema of Bill Forsyth. Oxford: Peter Lang.  Murray, Jonathan (2012). Blurring borders: Scottish cinema in the twenty‐first century. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 400–418. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2012.0097. Murray, Jonathan (2013). Give a dog a bone: representations of Scotland in the popular genre cinema of Neil Marshall. Visual Studies 28 (3): 227–237. doi:10.1080/ 1472586X.2013.830000. Murray, Jonathan (2015). The New Scottish Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Murray, Jonathan (2016). Red roads from realism: theorising relationships between technique and theme in the cinema of Andrea Arnold. Journal of British Cinema and Television 13 (1): 195–213.

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The Cinema Has Two Tongues The Cinema Cultures of Wales Daryl Perrins

It’s not where you’re from It’s not where you’re at It’s not where you’ve been It’s where you’re between It’s not what you’ve been It’s not what you’ve seen It’s where you’re between It’s not what you’ve seen It’s where you’re between (Super Furry Animals, ‘The International Language of Screaming’, 1997)

Introduction This chapter will consider screen representations of Wales and some of the problems involved in developing a screen culture for a nation which expresses itself through two languages. The article will identify key films and examine the ways in which Welsh cinema has been situated as a cinema of both national rehabilitation and national re‐imagining. Such narratives will be located in relation to the well‐ known divisions within Welsh culture identified by the political analyst Denis Balsom (1985). In his ‘three Wales model’, Balsom famously identified a tripartite division of Wales along political, linguistic, and geographical lines, drawing on ­patterns of employment, voting, language use, media consumption, and cultural allegiance. In this model only two areas  –  ‘Welsh Wales’, the English‐speaking

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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(soon to be) post‐industrial and solidly Labour‐voting South, centred on the valleys, and Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh‐speaking and Plaid Cymru‐voting West and North West  –  identified themselves as ‘Welsh’. According to Balsom, the third area – ‘British Wales’, a huge borderland that wraps itself around the other two and takes in the capital, Cardiff  –  had no specifically Welsh identity. While this twentieth-century model, overwhelmingly based on place, is inevitably reductive, it also suggests something of the complexities of Welsh identity and thus the challenges that have been involved in the construction of Wales on screen. It is undoubtedly the case, for example, that the first two identities have historically dominated media representations of the nation. The idea of ‘Welsh Wales’ became strongly associated with the mining cycle of films produced in the mid‐ twentieth century while the sensibilities of Y Fro Gymraeg found a natural home in the Welsh‐language television service, S4C. Language is, of course, essential to the understanding of Welsh culture even though the movement of Welsh speakers to the capital has punctured the idea of a rigidly‐defined linguistic heartland. Nevertheless, the notion of two Welsh cultures  –  one Welsh‐speaking and one English‐speaking – has remained current and has, to some extent, been reinforced by a binary education system. It also remains central to an understanding of the dynamics of identity within Wales and the traditions that have informed ideas of Welsh self hood in relation to others. The Welsh playwright/producer Ed Thomas has argued many times that to be Welsh is to be invisible in the context of the UK. However, without the recognition of difference within Wales, I would argue that the Welsh are invisible to each other. In 1983, Raymond Williams referred to the culture of Wales as ‘profoundly and consciously problematic’ and unable to be defined by any simple ‘ideological difference from a selective dominant and hegemonic English culture’ (2003, p. 20). This ‘problematic’ culture was evident in the 2016 EU referendum when 53% of the Welsh electorate declared loyalty to an idea of Britishness in voting to leave the EU ( James and Pritchard 2016). Somewhat ironically, the largest leave majorities were in the area Balsom had designated ‘Welsh Wales’ while some of the largest ‘remain’ margins were in the Welsh‐speaking Y Fro Gymraeg. Here (whether you agree with the outcome or not) it is clear that the electorate in the South Wales valleys were voting and identifying along class lines. In doing so, they were replicating the voting patterns of post‐industrial areas across the border (such as the North‐East of England) with which they shared a common history and economic inheritance. These commonalities, however, have been largely ignored during the period of political devolution. So while this chapter seeks to assess the role of filmmakers in the ‘invention’ of Wales as a small nation with a global scope and capacity to acknowledge hyphenated identities, it will also seek to tease out narratives that reveal the continuing currency of an identity based on commonalities that cannot easily be contained within theories of Welsh national regeneration, h ­ owever inclusive this process is taken to be.

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‘I was in Wales, It was just a dream’: Cinema and the Fate of the Language In the post‐devolution period there has been an increased desire on the part of Welsh‐ language filmmakers to address the Welsh diaspora, even though this represents a tiny exodus compared to other migratory movements from the Celtic fringe or when set against the movement of people both within and to Wales ­during the Industrial Revolution. This interest has spawned two pseudo‐documentaries, Separado (2010) and American Interior (2014), made by Super Furry Animals’ frontman Gruff Rhys and director Dylan Goch in Patagonia and North America respectively along with Marc Evans’ fictional feature Patagonia (2010). This impulse has been understood as part of a desire to make known a largely untold counter‐ narrative of the Welsh as active agents within an imperial age and as a mark of cultural confidence since devolution in 1997. This may be seen in America Interior where the story of the explorer John Evans’ search for a mythical Welsh homeland in the America of the eighteenth century is light‐heartedly retold in Gruff Rhys’ deadpan style with the aid of an aviator to play Evans. Here Gruff Rhys playfully and knowingly re‐enacts the Romantic search for a land where linguistic and religious autonomy could be assured, in a region discovered by Madoc – a medieval Welsh prince whom legend has it left North Wales and discovered North America in 1170 and who, together with his warriors, founded a pale‐skinned and Welsh‐ speaking tribe, y Madogwys. In its fantastical and zany way, American Interior is an example of a desire to pull up a stool at the table of hyphenated global identity that Ireland and Scotland now take for granted and replace what McLoone refers to as ‘a narrow and purist notion of identity’ with one that possesses ‘a global reach’ (2000, p. 2). Patagonia, the first fiction film since devolution to be made in part outside of Wales, presents the Welsh diaspora in an ambivalent manner. Indeed, for much of the film it presents the journey between Patagonia and Wales (and Wales and Patagonia) as a nostalgic quest. The opening scene, for example, illustrates Svetlana Boym’s thesis on nostalgia as ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’ (2001, p. xiii). The film begins with a prologue that introduces the history of the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa). This consists of the story of the 163 ‘men women and children’ who fled from ‘the poverty of their hill farms and the low wages of the coal mines’ in 1865 on the Mimosa and is told to us via a crackly recording of an unknown male voice in Welsh. At the same time this narrative is spelt out in hand‐written Spanish, on a yellowing manuscript that fills the screen. The voice and text tell us that the settlement has survived ‘and so has the dream of Patagonia’, a dream, according to Glyn Williams, of a new ‘little Wales beyond Wales’ free from the anglicising tide of industrialisation (Williams 1975, p. 19). After the credits, the film cuts between images of swaying grass, sunlight through trees, a young woman in traditional Welsh peasant dress standing against a red farmhouse and an elderly woman.



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Figure 27.1  The ‘masquerade of heritage’: Patagonia (2010).

The latter is Cerys (Marta Lubos) who sleeps clutching an old black‐and‐white photo of another farmhouse, this time with a family group in front of it. She is awoken from this afternoon nap by a servant bringing tea. She tells the servant in Spanish: ‘I was in Wales. It was just a dream.’ In the next scene the young woman from the elderly woman’s dream appears as a character from an historical drama in the same Welsh peasant‐style period dress and sweeping up in front of the red wall of a large period farmhouse (Figure 27.1). The first of a series of acts of defamiliarisation then takes place when we hear the peasant girl’s mobile phone ring and she answers it. The illusion of historical verisimilitude is thus broken and the masquerade of heritage comes to the surface. This is not a memory from Cerys’ youth in rural Wales but twenty‐ first‐century heritage as presented at the Welsh Folk Museum in St Fagan’s where the young woman Gwen (Nia Roberts) is revealed to be a tour guide. Later in the film we will revisit this scene when Cerys, some months earlier and now in Wales, passes Gwen outside the farmhouse on her way to the museum’s indoor galleries to watch a video presentation on the Welsh in Patagonia. In this scene, the film’s prologue is revealed to be part of an audio‐video exhibition on Patagonia for visitors to the museum. The use of the Welsh Folk Museum – now renamed (in the English version only) on the bilingual brown tourist signs as ‘St Fagan’s National History Museum’ – is significant here, for it has been the site of contested notions of Welsh identity since it opened in 1946. The film’s unmasking of Gwen as a representative of the museum’s primary ­subject – the Welsh gwerin (folk) – therefore implicitly asks the viewer to reconsider conventionally fixed notions of national identity. This iconic scene, with its

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collision of stovepipe hat, mobile phone, and school trip, not only complicates the form of the film but also the construction of ‘national history’. It is a rupture that has been read as one that opens up new possibilities for both the Welsh language and the characters who speak it. Kate Woodward (2012), drawing on Esther Whitfield (2011), has argued, for example, that, during a period of both increased involvement in the European project and political devolution at home, the film reveals a concern to internationalise Welsh cultural identity and draw global connections. In Patagonia, the Welsh language loses its indigenous status and here, somewhat ironically, is the language of the benign coloniser. Indeed, in scenes in Patagonia where neither Gwen nor her partner Rhys speak the official Argentine language of Spanish, Welsh becomes something akin to a lingua franca. This, in turn, has been seen as indicative of an emerging postcolonial future for Wales uncoupled from domestic – United Kingdom – political ties. In its suggestion of transnationalism, Patagonia not only draws on an European art cinema tradition but also Hollywood genre conventions in the form of the road movie. Organised around two journeys, the film’s first journey is an idealistic one into Patagonia made by Gwen and Rhys. Rhys is on a photo assignment to take pictures of the Welsh chapels in the desert. The second journey is to Wales and follows the trail of the elderly Welsh‐Argentinean woman – Cerys – to find the family farm where she was conceived out of wedlock and from where her mother was then cast out of Wales by the chapel elders. While the narratives are spatially and temporally independent, they both involve constructions of exoticism. In both cases, the personal journeys are defined by longing and a ‘call to adventure’. For Cerys, this is her looming death. For Gwen, the catalyst to travel with her partner derives from the discovery that she cannot bear children. Her narrative of escape and reconciliation is framed within the morality story of Blodeuwedd (‘Face of Flowers’), from The Mabingion (or rather Saunders Lewis’ twentieth‐century reworking of it). This is played out through a fleeting romance with a Welsh‐ Argentinean Gaucho (Mateo, played by Mathew Rees). The journey the non‐ Welsh‐speaking and partially‐sighted Cerys makes is far more quixotic (and therefore humorous). She travels to Wales with the (at first unwilling) assistance of her young agoraphobic neighbour, and ‘buddy’ character, Alejandro. Her unnarrated diasporic imagination is the governing device and this marks the film out narratively as ‘transnational’. Ezra and Rowden argue that, in transnational films, ‘a psychological investment in mobility is usually countered by the emotional construction of a homeland which provides a fundamental narrative of and a validating promise of return’ (Ezra and Rowden 2006, p. 7). Cerys’s ultimate destination – the drowned farm of Nant Briallu – is visually foretold via the rheumy‐eyed point‐of‐view shots that also frame her within the melancholic spell of longing or hiraeth. Within the road movie genre, the search for a place of belonging is the driving impetus, regardless of whether the protagonists’ search is for an actual physical place or the need to discover their ‘true selves’. As such, Patagonia and Wales are both presented in mythical terms. For Gwen and Rhys, the narrative of



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Patagonia is the archetype of the transformation of the ‘uncivilised’ desert into the Garden of Eden – an oblique allegory for Gwen’s barren condition and longing. Wales, for Cerys, on the other hand, represents a paradise lost from which she mourns her expulsion. The road to Patagonia has been a long one – it is a journey, however, in the establishment of a Welsh‐language screen culture that is linked to the imperatives for linguistic and cultural autonomy that informed the establishment of Y Wladfa. Its roots lie in the politicisation of the language that took place during the 1960s. During this decade the institutions that underpinned Welsh language culture returned to the arguments that led to the making of the first Welsh‐­language talkie in 1935, Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman). This film was made by first‐time director Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, the founder in 1922 of the Urdd Gobiath Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth) as a Christian bulwark against the erosion of the Welsh language. The art historian Peter Lord suggests that the birth of Welsh‐­ language cinema was developed as a belated response to the non­conformist preacher and Welsh‐language scholar D. Tecwyn Evans’ call for the cinema to be used to ‘win back the comparatively uneducated Gwerin’ who were ‘turning their backs on the indigenous culture’ (Lord 2000, p. 396). Similar anxieties regarding cultural erosion were expressed in the 1960s when Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society) was formed following the 1962 radio speech – Tynged yr Laith (The Fate of the Language) – made by the Plaid Cymru leader and literary figure, Saunders Lewis. This broadcast reached out to a new generation of the Welsh intelligentsia who came to embrace militant cultural nationalism and employ direct action in the fight for a Welsh‐language radio and television service (Adamson 1999, p. 64). The militant nature of this struggle was underlined in 1980 when the then Plaid Cymru leader, Gwynfor Evans, threatened to go on hunger strike unless a Welsh fourth channel came into being. In this respect, the ideological platform upon which S4C stood was very different to the agenda of its parent channel, Channel Four, which began in the same year of 1982. Put simply, while Channel Four was dedicated to cultural plurality and pioneering programming, S4C was grounded in the politics of cultural specificity and linguistic survival. With the number of Welsh speakers totalling 18.9% of the population in 1981, however, this was far from a ‘Welsh national channel’ and the existence of a Welsh‐ language channel serving only one language community ­provides strong evidence of a ‘two‐language nation’. Following early criticism of S4C films such as Owain Glyndŵ r (1983), which were criticised for being too populist, Berry (1994, p. 323) notes the emergence of ‘the kind of provocative, steely contemporary dramas its original champions had a right to anticipate’. While these Welsh‐language films were linked to a growing recognition within British cinema of the different nationalities and/or hyphenated identities that made up the UK, the films commissioned by S4C (around two per year between 1986 and 1993) also contributed to the debate around the emergence of a ‘postcolonial’ identity in Wales, given momentum after 1997 and the ‘Yes’ vote for

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devolution. While Blandford has argued that ‘[i]n terms of institutions and public policy, neither film nor television in Wales is postcolonial’, he also suggests how S4C constituted ‘a kind of postcolonial vanguard’ (2005, p. 183). Gareth Stanton also sees such films as constituting a ‘new Welsh cinema’ that offers a ‘postcolonial critique’ (2002, p.  77). This is counterposed to a popular English‐language cinema – represented by Twin Town (1997) and Human Traffic (1999) – in which he struggles to identify any particular Welsh ‘quality’ and asks whether it should be labelled ‘Welsh cinema’ at all (2002, pp. 85–86). These changes in sensibility may be seen in a number of films that seek to view national identity from a distance. Milwr Bychan / Boy Soldier (Karl Francis, 1986), for example, presents a Janus‐like identity in a young Welsh‐speaking and working‐ class British army squaddie from the South Wales valleys, Wil (Richard Lynch), on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Through the use of a number of flashbacks, it shows how Wil becomes increasingly alienated from a British identity that is given expression through the brutality, xenophobia, and dishonesty of the rank and file, his upper‐class superiors and the state (the latter represented by a reptilian‐like civil servant played by Bernard Hill). Central to this awakening is his brief liaison with a local Catholic girl, Deirdre. Through his experiences he comes to realise that, like the Catholic community he opposes in khaki, he is also one of the colonised. Branwen (Ceri Sherlock, 1994) continues the theme of a pan‐Celtic identity during the ‘Troubles’ by drawing parallels between the story of a naïve young Welsh nationalist woman who marries an Irish Republican and moves to Belfast and the tragic tale of Branwen, a mythological character from The Mabinogion (also referenced by Wil in Milwr Bychan in relation to Deirdre), who undertook the same journey after marrying the king of Ireland. Gadael Lenin (Leaving Lenin), (Endaf Emlyn, 1993), turns away from Celtic links and instead suggests an alternative to British identity in the new Europe of small nations. Set on a school trip from the South Wales valleys to Leningrad  –  the film uses the ‘end of Empire’ allegory afforded by the hand‐over from Communism to the chaos of unbridled capitalism to position Wales at the ‘end of history’. The breakaway notion of a new Wales is neatly signposted when the sixth‐formers are separated from the teachers when the Russian train coaches in which they are travelling become divided on an overnight sleeper to Leningrad. This leaves the teachers free to continue their journey of self‐discovery away from the old certainties of leftist industrial South Wales in a city that bears the name of the first Communist leader. The breakdown of old certainties is represented by the English teacher Mostyn  –  a romantic Marxist who discovers his wife Eileen, an art teacher, who is also on the trip, has been having an affair with a colleague. Politically and sexually undermined, Mostyn is left to hitchhike through a paradise lost at both home and abroad. As McLoone suggests, ‘the film proposes a need for new beginnings’ (2008, p. 355), albeit one that is as much post‐collective as it is postcolonial. Hedd Wyn (Paul Turner, 1992), along with Solomon and Gaenor (Paul Morrison, 1999) were both nominated for ‘Best Foreign Film’ at the Oscars. The Oscars



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therefore tacitly underlined the postcolonial project at S4C by aligning Welsh cinema with a model offered by world cinema. It also marked these films out as ‘exotic’ and ‘other’ in comparison to the cinema cultures of its Anglophone Celtic neighbours (and also Wales’ own English‐language cinema). Like Endaf Emlyn’s Un Nos Ola’ Leuad (One Full Moon) (1991), Hedd Wyn is one of a number of S4C films offering a critique of Welsh fundamentalist religion. The film is critical of nonconformism for its abandonment of abstentionism and adoption of an active role in recruitment for the trenches in the First World War. The tenets of Christian pacifism are nonetheless associated with Ellis Humphrey Evans (bardic name Hedd Wyn), the eponymous war poet who dies at Passchendaele and was posthumously awarded the Bard’s Chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod. In the film, the British army on manoeuvres in North Wales are presented as an occupying force (in a two‐dimensional manner akin to their representation in Milwr Bychan) who, by training for war on the mountainside and shelling the landscape, re‐enact the trope of the destruction of an Arcadian Wales by outside forces previously established in How Green Was My Valley ( John Ford, 1943). This is shown as an attack on the very foundation of the culture of the agricultural gwerin (folk) after whom the museum in St Fagan’s was named. Traditionally associated with a rural and Welsh‐speaking identity that is essentially classless and connected to a tradition of autodidactism, the shepherd poet Ellis Humphrey Evans thus represents a classic incarnation of an archetype regarded as continually under threat. Running through all the S4C‐commissioned films discussed above is the performance of identity that is the Welsh language, language as a very conscious political act. In Branwen it is a language within a family of languages on the western seaboard, its use and acquisition operating alongside the Irish language to explore the problematic dynamics and misunderstandings within a nonetheless shared Celtic identity. In Milwr Bychan and Hedd Wyn, it is presented as a symbol of both alien difference and a shared code which can be clandestinely employed against the coloniser, in military prisons or parade grounds alike. In the films of Endaf Emlyn, the journey of the language from an archaic peasant tongue on the edge of Empire, excluded from the classroom in Un Nos Ola’ Leuad, to one belonging to a new Europe of small nations in Gadael Lenin is revelatory. Language and identity are inseparable here. As Kate Woodward suggests, in her discussion of Milwr Bychan and Hedd Wyn, ‘the Welsh language is a site of struggle, but by exploring its difference with the English language, it is also a means of defining and strengthening one’s identity’ (2006, p. 52). The question of national identity and interpellation is an important one and was brought home to me some years ago when I screened Rhosyn a Rhith (Coming up Roses), (Stephen Bayley, 1986), an Ealing‐style comedy, set and shot in the Cynon and Rhondda valleys in which all the characters communicate through the Welsh language. When viewed by a group of English‐speaking South Walian ­students from the area, the film was met with a degree of derision. To them the characters were speaking a largely unheard language and the

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only way some could make sense of it was to place the film many decades ­earlier than the mid‐1980s. This experience chimes with what Ed Thomas has previously observed when discussing theatre and representation in Wales. ‘Naturalism and the Welsh language are incompatible’, he suggests, ‘[s]ince there isn’t a one hundred per cent Welsh speaking community, Realism becomes an absurdist concept …’ (in Walford Davies 2005, pp. 9–10). For a domestic audience Welsh‐language cinema offers the possibility of both cultural identification and dissonance in equal measure. Officially in Wales the emphasis is on a shared bilingual identity (the Welsh Language Act of 1993 and latterly the Welsh Language Measure of 2011 have made Wales ceremoniously bilingual). As the writer Marion Eames (1997) has suggested: ‘[i]n Wales we are a two‐language nation. Notice that I don’t say we are a bilingual nation. That would indicate that everyone in Wales speaks two languages, which is patently untrue’. The word ‘bilingual’ implies that there is an equality of movement between the languages; ‘two‐language nation’, on the other hand, reveals the reality that movement between the two is only available to the possessor of both in a nation where only 19%, can actually speak two languages (StatsWales 2015). The ‘two‐language nation’ therefore suggests that a ‘sub‐state cinema’ conducted in a minority language poses potential problems for audience identification within Wales. Such problems become particularly acute when the issue of class is raised. While there are of course exceptions (the ex‐slate towns of the North West, for example), Welsh is no longer in any meaningful sense the language of the urban working class (identified with both post‐industrial settlements and the cities). The contemporary films made by S4C in Welsh, therefore, have struggled to offer linguistic verisimilitude (and therefore audience identification) in depictions of the dominant working‐class culture of South Wales – a group and culture that is overwhelmingly non‐Welsh‐speaking (Aitchison and Carter 1994). While the social dynamics of language has been discussed at length by sociologists, it has been largely ignored by media commentators and scholars. The engine of the national(ist) project has been, according to Fevre et al. (1997, p. 563), the preserve of what they call ‘the Welsh class’, a middle‐class ‘status group’ (including film and television professionals) defined by a shared sense of dignity or ‘honour and prestige’ provided by ‘participation in Welsh‐speaking society and culture’. As a result, S4C films are often narratively informed by an Eisteddfod‐based literary tradition (involving repeated allusions to the mythical tales within The Mabinogion) accessible via a Welsh‐language education. The issue of class and linguistic verisimilitude raises its head in Patagonia in a scene where Cerys’ search for her ancestral home takes her and her young companion to a café deep in the South Wales valleys. Here a slice of social realism appears to be on offer through the appearance of a group of out of work youths (represented as ‘chavs’ in sports casual), with a teenage mother with a pram in tow. This is surely a playful dip into the alienated post‐industrial South Wales of popular



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imagination found in the black comedy Twin Town (1997). However, the fact that they are Welsh‐speaking chavs means that to an audience from Wales the scene offers less a slice of social realism than yet another jolt of defamiliarisation to an audience familiar with the area. The scene in ‘the valleys’ in Patagonia only avoids Thomas’ charge of absurdity if its inclusion is understood within the whimsical/ fairy tale features of Cerys’ road‐movie narrative through Wales. Nevertheless, in a film (and film culture) where language is ideologically charged, the use of Welsh here may appear to an international audience to be calibrated to counter an earlier appearance of the English language in the film. This is when the other female protagonist, Gwen, is given the highly sensitive news by an Anglophone doctor (whom we never see and is therefore literally faceless) in a Cardiff hospital that she is unable to have children (a scene that many Welsh speakers would conceivably read in terms of indignity). Through this simple binary, the authenticity of the Welsh language within a prescribed set of colonial power relations is implied for an audience unfamiliar with the nuances of language use in Wales. Other approaches did, of course, emerge. Solomon and Gaenor (which was also shot back‐to‐back in English and Welsh versions) shows that S4C commissioned films by the end of the 1990s that offered up alternative linguistic models. Here, as Blandford (2007) has argued, the use of language (both versions of the film to a greater or lesser extent feature Welsh and English alongside Yiddish) is far more complex. In the first instance, it locates the story of inter‐racial romance in relation to the Anti‐Jewish Riots of 1911 in Tredegar. This is a multilingual coal‐rush society in flux, where minority languages are employed in ways that reveal a more complex set of identities, character motivations, and interdependencies. Indeed, as Blandford goes on to argue, Solomon and Gaenor ‘works linguistic conflict into the  spectators’ own experience of the film as a deliberate aesthetic strategy’ (2007, p. 91) and, in doing so, the film offers a reading of language as a source of misunderstanding, as well as an expression of shifting power relations, rather than simply a straightforward form of ethnic expression. The most talked about re‐imagining of Wales has taken place in television, through the rebooting of the Dr. Who (2005–) franchise and its adult spin‐off Torchwood (2006–2011), which coincided with the opening of Roath Lock studios in 2011 as part of the decentralisation of the BBC to the regions (see Blandford et al. 2010; McElroy 2011). Thanks to the initiatives of the many‐hatted Ed Thomas and his production company, Fiction Factory, television has also been leading the way in relation to a re‐imagining of the Welsh‐language drama. The soap‐style series Caerdydd (S4C, 2006–2009), tagged as a ‘stylish new drama about modern urban Welsh‐speakers living in a bilingual city’, introduced a mode of linguistic hybridity to the channel, depicting how young Welsh speakers unselfconsciously pepper their speech with English and also code‐switch between the two languages (in a capital where Welsh is spoken by around 11% of the population) (Office for National Statistics 2004). This approach, nevertheless, generated criticisms about the way in which ‘English is eating away at the heart of what S4C should be doing’

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(Medhurst, quoted in Rowland 2006) and led to the programme being debated at the National Eisteddfod with Thomas in attendance. Code‐switching is also central to the domestic success of Fiction Factory’s Scandinavian‐style noir crime drama Y Gwyll / Hinterland (S4C/BBC Cymru Wales, 2013–), a series that is ‘[p]art Wallander, part Broadchurch … overlaid by a cinematic dose of Top of the Lake’ (McElroy 2013). The series is a joint production between S4C and BBC Wales and represents a breaking down of traditional divisions tied to language and culture in Wales. For while S4C’s raison d’être has been the preservation of the Welsh language, a project historically associated with Plaid Cymru, BBC Wales has been historically associated with an ‘old Labour’ version of English‐speaking Wales linked to the South Wales valleys. Marc Evans, for example, who directed the very first episode of the series, suggested that in the past that: ‘[t]he BBC has its own agenda in Wales and there is no doubt as to where it thinks the “true” Wales is, and that’s in the Rhondda valley’ (quoted in Blandford 2000, p. 86). This ‘back‐to‐back’ (English and Welsh) production, however, is unique in that Y Gwyll is all in Welsh, while Hinterland is officially the bilingual version and is split into episodes of approximately 80% English and 20% Welsh (with subtitles), a language ratio that roughly reflects the percentage of Welsh spoken throughout the nation. For Helle Michelson (2014, p. 94), Y Gwyll represents an all‐Welsh ‘never‐never land’ which she suggests was ‘made as a cultural/political statement in support of the Welsh language’. On the other hand, the characters’ code‐switching in Hinterland reflects the psychological realities of living in a two‐ language nation through its communication of ‘the feel of life in Aberystwyth, which is governed by the presence of the two languages and the constant refocusing of your linguistic awareness’. As Michelson suggests, the latter version is perhaps closer to how Welsh is experienced as a ‘living language’ through the continual acts of negotiation it involves. The notion of a Welsh ‘never‐never‐land’ might also be applied to the final third of Patagonia in which the elderly Cerys nears her end. Snowdonia is presented as the ‘sunlit uplands’ of Welsh Arcadia shot in a way to compete with Patagonia and the mighty Andes. It is represented as a place peopled by an idealised family who provide Cerys and her companion, Alejandro, with respite and represent a strong contrast to the ‘chavs’ to be found in the south. In the sublime setting of a lakeside campsite, Alejandro also finds Sissy (played by the pop singer Duffy), a girl he first met and fell for in a bar in Cardiff some nights before. Cerys meanwhile finds that her family homestead now lies under an artificial lake that clearly references Tryweryn reservoir. This was created in 1965 when the residents of one of the last all Welsh‐speaking villages, Capel Celyn, were ­relocated and the valley it stood on was flooded to provide drinking water for Liverpool. This episode, which highlighted Wales’ complete lack of authority over its borders, was more or less universally opposed throughout Wales by both Welsh and English speakers alike. It also galvanised the campaign for both the language and for greater political self‐determination and has come to represent for some in Wales something akin to a national



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trauma. The artist Iolo Bala (2003, p. 41), for example, suggests that this bloodless event ‘verges upon being our Wounded Knee, our Bloody Sunday, a symbol for the political repression of our community and of protest and resistance’. On the face of it, the construction of Snowdonia as idyll, the symbolism of the lake, and Marta’s nostalgic quest for ‘the prelapsarian moment’ (Boym 2001, p. 49) suggest a movement towards what Boym describes as ‘restorative nostalgia’. This is a mode that ‘characterises national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti‐modern mythmaking of history by returning to national symbols and myths and occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories’ (2001, p. 41). However, Cerys’ journey is a highly personal and largely ambiguous one that also reveals features of Boym’s ‘reflective’ mode. As the film’s self‐reflexive opening suggests, Patagonia’s appeal to nostalgia is aware ‘of the gap between identity and resemblance’ (Boym 2001, p 50) and offers a final act of defamiliarisation in the form of a shift to a magic realism which has been hinted at throughout the film but has never been fully realised. Following her peaceful death beside the lake, Cerys’ body is first surrounded by garlands of flowers and then set ablaze in a Viking‐style water burial at dusk – all within sight of the A498 to Porthmadog! As Boym suggests, reflective nostalgia can also be ‘ironic and humorous’ (2001, p. 49). In this way, Patagonia may invoke the nostalgia involved in national myth‐ making but also signals its distance from it.

‘Can you imagine Lou Reed walking around Banwen?’: English‐Language Cinema It is generally agreed that the separate existence of S4C as a commissioner of film in Wales resulted in a lag in the production of significant English‐language films. For while S4C was a Welsh‐language channel at home, it was a Welsh channel per se outside of its borders and one that was perceived to be in receipt of ample support. As Barlow et al. (2005, p. 84) suggest, the locus for Welsh cinema in the English language during the 1980s became the film and video workshop movement centred on Chapter Arts Centre in Canton, Cardiff. This received funding from Channel Four and the Welsh Arts Council and acted as a catalyst for Red Flannel, a women’s film workshop located in Pontypridd. Red Flannel sought to document the experience of local women and to reflect the changes wrought by the eclipse of heavy industry in the valleys. The documentary Mam (1988) is indicative of their work. Welsh‐feature filmmaking in the English language, ­however, has been seen to come of age with the appearance of three films that  roughly coincided with the narrow victory for the ‘Yes’ camp in the vote for  political devolution for Wales in 1997. These films are House of America (Marc  Evans, 1997), Twin Town (Kevin Allen, 1997), and Human Traffic ( Justin Kerrigan, 1999). These three films took on iconic significance and seemed to

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respond to Ed Thomas’ declaration in the Observer (1997) that ‘Old Wales is dead’ and that the Welsh were now in a position ‘to make up, re‐invent, redefine’ and reconstitute ‘an eclectic self‐defined Wales with attitude’ (quoted in Blandford 2005, p. 177). Central to this re‐making was the notion of ‘Cool Cymru’ – the Welsh branch of ‘Cool Britannia’ that saw for the first time Wales produce a clutch of popular indie bands in the form of the Manic Street Preachers, the Super Furry Animals, and Catatonia. According to Kate Woodward, the appearance of Twin Town, House of America, and Human Traffic signalled a break with past cinematic representations and the emergence of a ‘New Wales’ involving shifts ‘from choirs to cool Cymru, from uniformity to power, from servility to confidence, and from heavy industries of coal mining and steel works to the new technologies of computers and call centres’ (2003, p. 191). Such shifts, however, should not be conceived as absolute and the ‘old’ continued to permeate the ‘new’. Of the three films, it is the crime comedy Twin Town that most pointedly appears to be attempting to disengage from the past. This is largely through its iconoclastic approach to the sacred cows of South Walian identity. Rugby, for example, is iconoclastically positioned at the heart of criminality when rugby legend Phil Bennett’s ball from the 1970s is found to be stuffed with cocaine. The once‐dignified male‐ voice choir meanwhile is reduced to singing Mungo Jerry’s hit In the Summertime in order to survive in the post‐industrial world. The Welsh language does not escape either: as Staunton observes it is ‘spoken to the dog, or [used] as a cover for double‐ dealing’ (2002, p. 84). While I have previously celebrated the film’s anarchic energy (Perrins 2000), it now appears, in retrospect, to be too caustic a letter home, providing a ‘by numbers’ approach to cultural deconstruction that fails to offer any way forward. Indeed, in his discussion of the final scene, when the male voice choir performs, at the end of Mumbles Pier, a highly sincere rendition of Myfanwy to accompany Fatty Lewis’ burial at sea, Stanton suggests that the film ends up failing ‘to sever the links with past regimes of representation and simply demonstrates their pervasive power’ (2002, p. 84). All three films from the cycle were compared with Trainspotting. However, it is House of America that most resembles Trainspotting in the way in which it appropriates youth culture. As in Trainspotting, music is shown to play a pivotal role in the construction of identity and the portrait of the contrasting worlds of American and Welsh culture that the film represents. The film’s central character Sid (Steven Mackintosh) exclaims in the local pub that Tom Jones is ‘no Elvis’ in a criticism of Wales’ apparent lack of a worthwhile popular mythology. Later in the pub one‐ time Lou Reed sideman, John Cale, is offered as an alternative. However, this is tempered by the incredulity that someone from the Velvet Underground could have really come from Wales. As Sid puts it, ‘Can you imagine Lou Reed walking around Banwen ? No way, not cool enough for him. He’s probably never even heard of Wales’. For Sid, the void is filled by Jack Kerouac, his motorbike, and the mythology of the road represented by an absent father. Kate Woodward (2006, p. 60) concludes that the dysfunctional family at the heart of House of America is the



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antithesis of the Morgan family in How Green Was My Valley and that the traditional ‘Welsh Mam’, associated with the industrial age, is replaced here by a post‐industrial ‘mad Mam’ (here played by Sian Philips, who played Beth Morgan in the 1975 BBC adaptation). Like How Green Was My Valley, however, the film offers a wildly romantic image of nationhood which also longs for a different and ‘higher’ Wales (in this case a cooler one). To underline this, the film ends with a reprise of the song ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ by the Manic Street Preachers as the credits roll. This offers a fitting counterpoint to Tom Jones’ version of ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ heard at various points and links the central character’s suicidal trajectory with the band’s celebrated lyricist and guitarist Richey Evans who went ‘missing presumed dead’ near the Severn Bridge in 1995. In doing so, a Welsh myth worthy of youth culture is created and the re‐imagining of a ‘switched‐on’ Wales, as championed by Ed Thomas, might be said to emerge. However, it is Human Traffic that both Blandford (2007) and Woodward (2003) believe offers the clearest response to Thomas’ call for the nation to re‐invent itself as an ‘eclectic self‐defined Wales with attitude’. The film follows the exploits of five friends over a loaded weekend in Cardiff and, more obviously than House of America, adopts a highly kinetic approach to filmmaking indebted to Trainspotting that involves the use of direct address to camera, freeze‐framing, intertitles, captions, and a distinctive logotype. The film portrays a group of young people who are not demonstrably Welsh: a Wales recognisable to the outside world appears only in cameo form, as in a walk‐on by Howard Marks (who was himself later to become the subject of the 2010 biopic Mr. Nice). This absence of specificity led Martin McLoone to conclude that the film offers a 48‐hour departure from the burden of representation by offering ‘a vision of Cardiff that is “anywhere‐but‐ Wales” ’ (2008, p. 351). In an interview celebrating 15 years since its release, the Cardiffian director of the film and graduate of Newport Film School, Justin Kerrigan, suggests, h ­ owever, that the film was pursuing local rather than ethnic specificity: When I was in Newport Film School, I remember thinking that there were ‘Welsh films’ and there were ‘English Films’, but Cardiff is a planet of its own, it’s unique; why aren’t there films that represent Cardiff ? So I went on a mission to make a film that represents Cardiff as I saw it, and show the club culture that me and my friends were part of at the time. (quoted in Williams 2014)

As Finch has argued, the capital Cardiff has been ‘regarded as too English, too distant, too flash, too fast, too large and far too anti‐Welsh for many’ (Finch 1999, p. 19). Such sentiments may be seen to inform the fantasy scene in the pub in which Jip ( John Simm) decides ‘it’s time for a new national anthem’. The national anthem in question is the British (and of course English) one, rather than Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (‘Old Land of My Fathers’). Here the film pointedly swerves away from the Welsh iconoclasm of Twin Town and House of America and nails its flag of identity to a

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different mast by having the five friends lead a rousing pub sing‐along from the perspective of alienated British youth: ‘Our generation … Alienation …Have we a soul?’ This scene not only expresses the continuing existence (post‐devolution) of Britain’s ‘fuzzy frontiers’ (Cohen 2001) but also the ability for British identity to be constantly re‐imagined at the level of musical youth sub‐culture (in this case, rave culture). Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan slacker universe associated with the Welsh capital created in the film may also be linked, as McLoone suggests, to ‘the cinematic decolonisation of Britain’s Celtic fringe’, whereby the periphery acquires the ‘metropolitan urbanity’ that, historically, has been associated with the centre (2008, p. 351).

‘Sunny Days in January’: The Contemporary Scene Since the 1990s we have seen the end of the cycle of English‐language films which rode the wave of ‘Cool Cymru’ as well as the forced retreat at S4C from its previous levels of film commissioning. It is notable that none of the films of the English‐ language cycle received funding from within Wales despite the ‘devolution’ of the film industry that had been occurring. The funding of English‐language films from within Wales really only came after the funding body Sgrin was dissolved in 2006 and replaced by the Film Agency for Wales (subsequently Ffilm Cymru Wales). In the same year, the Wales Creative IP Fund offered small amounts of funding to filmmakers while the Welsh Screen Commission (subsequently rebranded Wales Screen) provided additional support for filmmaking in Wales. These new initiatives contributed to Wales becoming an increasingly attractive location for the making of international films, as in the case of Robin Hood (2010), alongside a number of films dealing with Welsh subjects. Such films included the  social‐realist drama A Way of Life (Amma Asante, 2004), Gideon Koppel’s ­documentary on the hill community of Trefeurig, Sleep Furiously (2007), the biographical films The Edge of Love ( John Maybury, 2008) and Mr Nice (Bernard Rose, 2010), the coming‐of‐age comedy Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010), the wartime drama, Resistance (Amit Gupta, 2011), two films in separate languages by the ­prolific Welsh director Marc Evans – the English‐language Hunky Dory (2011) and the Welsh‐language Patagonia (in association with S4C), the road documentaries Separado! (2010) and American Interior (2014) and the BBC Films comedy set during the miners’ strike, Pride (made in 2014 with the assistance of Wales Screen). For Kate Woodward, what marked out the wave of films of the 1990s was their capacity to explode myths ‘because the directors were themselves Welsh, or had strong Welsh connections’ (Woodward 2003, p. 191). By way of contrast, many of the films above were made by directors who were not residents of Wales. This has, to some extent, relieved the filmmakers of the post‐devolution burden of national representation and helped to encourage the making of films interested in bringing



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to the surface unsung and/or submerged identities or in acknowledging the continuing significance of ‘residual’ cultural practices. This may be seen in A Way of Life, directed by Amma Asante, a Londoner from a Ghanaian background. The film departs from the formal and narrative strategies that marked out the earlier cycle of iconoclastic films and involves a return to the social realism associated in Wales with Karl Francis. As in Karl Francis’ BBC film Streetlife (1995), post‐industrial Wales is viewed from the perspective of a single mother trapped on benefits and backed into a corner not of her making. The difference however, is that the film also deals with the murder of Hassan Osman, a Turkish man who has lived in Wales for 30 years and is still treated as an outsider by a white racist gang who, for very different reasons, also occupy a disadvantaged place in Welsh society. The young single mother, with whom we sympathised in Streetlife, is replaced, in this film, by the teenager Leigh‐Anne (Stephanie James) who acts as the gang’s de facto leader. This is a film directed by a woman with a young female working‐class ­protagonist at its centre that challenges ‘reductive ideas about gender, race and ultimately nation as components of contemporary identity in Wales’ (Blandford 2007, p. 103). Specifically it replaces the narrative of Welsh cultural suppression with the implicitly British motif of racism. In the lead‐up to the fatal assault after Leigh‐ Anne has been refused a benefits loan by the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), she screeches that it would ‘be different if I’d a black face, wunnit?’ As Blandford indicates, this is an ugly portrait of racism set against ‘the irony of a marginalised people who themselves then turn upon the minority in their midst’ (Blandford 2007, p. 104). The film was accused of being ‘depressing’ at its premiere in Cardiff and certainly marks a departure from the image of ‘Cool Cymru’, warning as it does of the vacuum that the removal of old certainties represents for those left behind. It is a vacuum that the historian Dai Smith, writing in 1999, argued ‘we are still allowing ourselves to inhabit, in the clapped-out fag‐end of industrial Wales’ history’ (1999, p. 9). Pride, on the other hand, seeks to retrieve a sense of the collectivism involved in the support given to the miners of the Dulais valley during the strike of 1984/85 by LSGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners). This is very much a British film, written by the English actor and writer Stephen Beresford, directed by the West‐End theatre director Mathew Warchus and starring such British stalwarts as Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, and Paddy Considine. If Patagonia acknowledges the end of one Welsh culture under the dark waters of Tryweryn, Pride represents the swan song of the industrialising (and anglicising) Wales from which those who went to Patagonia fled. This is a Welsh identity that is in part the product of the sort of influx traditionally associated with the new world. In the latter stages of the nineteenth century, for example, ‘labour’, according to Jones, ‘was being drawn into the South Wales coalfield at a rate exceeded only by immigration into the USA’ (1995, p. 152), creating a legacy reflected in the film’s use of English, Irish,

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and Scottish surnames as well as Welsh. As Jeffrey Richards argues, this process of industrialisation led to the emergence of a ‘strongly communal’ working‐class culture based around the working men’s club, the collieries, the union, rugby, boxing, and choral societies. While much of this culture overlapped with similar working‐class cultures in the industrial North of England, Richards also suggests it possessed a specific Welsh dimension when set against the values associated with rural Welsh culture, and generated ‘its own legends every bit as potent as Madoc or the Druids’ (1997, p. 56). Unlike the films commissioned by S4C which emphasise the ethno‐linguistic links forged in opposition to British authority, Pride’s foregrounding of the ­alliance  between gay activists from London with unemployed miners and their families from the Dulais Valley acknowledges the significance of common bonds (Figure 27.2). In this regard, the film represents what Dai Smith described, during the first year of the strike, as ‘the multifarious, actual interrelationships of peoples held by the word British’. For Smith, this resulted in a dual identity for the Welsh grounded in the ‘historical experience of unity found in the description of themselves as “British” by working people in strikes, unions, depression and war’ (Smith 1984, p. 168). The anti‐establishment ‘Blitz spirit’ of Pride, therefore, reasserts the tradition of a radical Britain, last mobilised en masse during the anti‐Thatcher battles of the 1980s, rather than a binary form of postcolonial identification. Pride follows on from The Full Monty, Brassed Off, and Billy Elliot as a mainstream attempt to dramatise through popular forms the death throes of British industrial society. It is, however, more radical than any of the above, offering, for example, an alternative to Billy Elliot’s suspicion of collectivism. It replaces the narrative structure of a single character overcoming the odds (as in Billy Elliot), by placing an emphasis on the ensemble and the importance of collective action and solidarity with others. It also places a premium on the ­emancipation of women, emphasising the significance of female agency for both the characters themselves and the

Figure 27.2  ‘Common bonds’: Pride (2014).



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community. In doing so, Pride identifies the continued relevance of those ‘residual’ cultural practices from ‘old Wales’ – here class consciousness – that might yet be employed, in Daniel Williams’ words, ‘as resources for resistance in the emergent future’ (2003, p. xxxii). The last film I want to discuss in this section on films made, in part, by outsiders is Sleep Furiously. I use the term ‘outsider’ here cautiously but confidently, for while Gideon Koppel is a Welsh resident, the perspective he offers is one of a comparative outsider, in the sort of agricultural community where traditionally ‘belonging’ is defined by generations of residence. The most celebrated of films supported by Film Agency Wales, it is set in the hill country behind Aberystwyth, in the village of Trefeurig. It is a highly personal poetic documentary that follows in the tradition of Humphrey Jennings, seeking to avoid the sociological function associated with the documentary form by using associative images to evoke emotional responses. This is an elegiac film, with a soundtrack by Aphex Twin, on the passing seasons in a Welsh hill‐farming community that to all appearances seems to be ­signalling a culture in flux and/or decline. What is particularly interesting here is that this passing of tradition also appears to be felt by someone whom many in Wales would see as the reason for its decline – the English‐speaking incomer into Y Fro Gymraeg (the unofficial Welsh Gaeltacht). However, as Koppel has indicated, this film is far removed from any existing consensus around change and loss: Almost every story in Sleep Furiously suggests both beginning and ending  –  the ­circularity of life. The owl dies but then becomes something else – a sculpture; the piglets are cute and loveable but will be equally appealing when unrecognisable – grilled with a little salt and pepper. I guess that the paradoxical and contradictory in life, however difficult, are important for me. So it is not that I set out to specifically eliminate sentimentality or nostalgia. My intention was for the film to create its own moral constructs rather than use assumed values. (Koppel, in Wood and Smith 2015, p. 163)

The theme of change and rebirth is also threaded through the community which is made up of both natives and incomers. We hear Welsh, lots of it, but we also hear English spoken with English accents: street poets from the West Country and town‐criers from the North of England and farmers from Liverpool. These people are not second‐home owners but have lived in the community over decades. They are not the new gwerin, however. As Koppel suggests, continuity is not the point here but rather the way in which incomers have become integral to both the present and future shape and civic identity of rural Wales. Koppel, for example, captures the English‐accented voice of a woman declaring ‘I’ve been here for 25 years’ during a meeting organised to oppose the closing of the local primary school. Koppel’s film then is one that is free of the usual allegiances and equations, providing a very personal picture of the rural Welsh community to which the primary school belongs, even though it’s a school that the filmmaker did not attend.

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Koppel, the London‐born and Liverpool‐raised son of German‐Jewish artists who were refugees from Nazism (Koppel’s grandmother was murdered in Treblinka) has said the film is his ‘internal landscape’ (Wood and Smith 2015, p. 160). In many ways, the film offers a childlike and therefore non‐judgemental perspective that returns the viewer to the position of Koppel as an incomer from Liverpool (in interviews he still refers to people from the area in the third person). This childhood perspective is very quietly signposted by kitchen‐top level scenes of the mid‐section of a woman (which may or may not be his mother) making a sponge, the understated excitement upon first seeing the bright yellow library van coming down the valley towards the Koppel home and a lengthily‐held shot of a border collie watching his master drive away in a pick‐up. Koppel spent such summers helping on local farms and much of the film is devoted to the seasonal rituals of haymaking, sheep‐ shearing, and the turning of the soil. These are edited into the domestic life of the village which is presented with the same quiet dignity as agricultural labour. Knitting all this together is the mobile library van and its driver, John, who preserves the memory of the community by talking to his ageing readers about once‐thriving village societies and passes out books on local history. Change and rebirth come his way also, however, in the guise of a laptop computer which he must and will eventually master, and which will in time itself become part of a tradition. While Koppel has in interviews refused to be drawn on the cultural significance of his creation, it’s clear that this film is coming from the still‐undefined borders of  Welsh identity. Within what Balsom called Y Fro Gymraeg is a population of incomers drawn almost exclusively by the prospect of Wales as a rural idyll/place of escape, who live alongside the long‐established Welsh‐speaking culture of the North and West. As Chris Williams (2005, p. 14) notes, there were, at the 2001 census, 590 000 people in Wales who were born in England, making them the ­largest ethnic grouping after the Welsh in Wales. This largely unacknowledged proportion of the population (around 20% of the total) are generally only ever discussed within Wales as a threat to the language. However, as Williams also points out, the figure for incomers now outstrips the number of Welsh speakers in Wales. He therefore concludes that ‘[a] definition of Welshness that ignored Welsh speakers would generally be held to be untenable’ while a ‘­definition of Welshness that recognises only three‐quarters of the people of Wales were born in Wales has yet to be articulated’. Perhaps Sleep Furiously, without its consent, and in its own quiet and unassuming way, is doing just that.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that Wales has developed a screen culture that has moved at different speeds and within different trajectories. A Welsh‐language cinema has developed that is inseparable from its relationship with S4C, an institution closely



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associated with the struggle for the language and the national project. This has understandably led to a cinema that stresses an ethno‐linguistic model of identity. However, this model also raises questions of audience identification and representation – particularly in relation to the Welsh working class – when the language of identification (Welsh) is a minority tongue in a demographically diverse post‐ industrial two‐language nation. This cinema may be contrasted with the iconoclastic English‐language cinema created by native filmmakers during and directly after devolution. This brand of cinema consciously engaged with the past by ‘re‐imagining’ the nation and even proposing a ‘clean break’ with the ‘old Wales’ of earlier cinematic representations. Partly due to a limited expansion of the infrastructure for filmmaking, the Welsh cinema that followed proved to be less iconoclastic, re‐imagining Wales after devolution in different and less clear‐cut ways. It did so through the acknowledgement of marginalised people and communities, the assertion of the continued relevance of collective class consciousness and an acknowledgement of previously unacknowledged identities to be found below the surface of traditional models of Welsh identity identified by Denis Balsom back in 1985.

References Adamson, D (1999). The intellectual and the National Movement in Wales. In: Nation, Identity and Social Theory: Perspectives from Wales (ed. R Fevre and A Thompson). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Aitchison, J. and Carter, H. (1994). Language and class in Wales. Planet: The Welsh Internationalist 105: 11–16. Bala, Iwan (2003). Here and Now: Essays on Contemporary Art in Wales. Bridgend: Seren. Balsom, Denis (1985). The three Wales model. In: The National Question Again: Welsh Political Identity in the 1980s (ed. John Osmond), 1–17. Llandysul: Gomer Press. Barlow, David, Mitchell, Philip, and O’Malley, Tom (2005). The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Berry, Dave (1994). Wales and the Cinema: The First Hundred Years. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Blandford, Steve (2000). Making House of America: an interview with Marc Evans and Marc Thomas. In: Wales on Screen (ed. Steve Blandford), 66–89. Bridgend: Seren Press. Blandford, Steve (2005). Dramatic fictions in a postcolonial Wales. In: Postcolonial Wales (ed. Jane Aaron and Chris Williams), 177–192. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Blandford, Steve (2007). Film Drama and the Break‐Up of Britain. Bristol: Intellect Press. Blandford, Steve, S. Lacey, R. McElroy, and R. Williams (2010). Screening the Nation: Wales and Landmark Television. Report for the BBC Trust/Audience Council Wales. Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Cohen, Robin (2001). Fuzzy frontiers of identity: the British case. In: Race and Ethnicity: Solidarities and Communities (ed. Harry Goulbourne), 134–164. London: Routledge. Eames, Marion (1997). A Private Language? A Dip into Welsh Literature. Llandysul: Gowmer Press.

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Ezra, Elizabeth and Rowden, Terry (2006). General Introduction: what is transnational cinema?’. In: Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (ed. Elizabeth Ezra), 1–12. London: Routledge. Fevre, Ralph, Denney, David, and Boland, John (1997). Class, status and party in the analysis of nationalism: lessons from Max Weber. Nations and Nationalism 3 (4): 559–577. Finch, Peter (1999). Culture and the City – 1 Cardiff. Planet: The Welsh Internationalist 138: 19–25. James, David and Pritchard, Heledd. (2016). ‘The full EU referendum results map for every area in Wales. Wales Online, 24 June. Available at: www.walesonline.co.uk/news/ politics/full‐eu‐referendum‐results‐map‐11510374.(accessed 7 July 2016). Jones, Gareth Elwyn (1995). Modern Wales: A Concise History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lord, Peter (2000). The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. McElroy, Ruth (2011). ‘Putting the landmark back into television’: producing place and cultural value in Cardiff. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 7 (3): 175–184. McElroy, Ruth. (2013). ‘What can Wales learn from Nordic Noir?’, CST Online. Available at: http://cstonline.net/what‐can‐wales‐learn‐from‐nordic‐noir‐by‐ruth‐mcelroy (accessed 10 November 2018). McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: BFI. McLoone, Martin (2008). Internal decolonisation? British cinema in the Celtic fringe. In: The British Cinema Book., 3e (ed. Robert Murphy), 350–356. London: BFI. Michelson, Helle (2014). One Wales, two versions: Y Gwyll/Hinterland. Planet: The Welsh Internationalist 213: 88–97. Office for National Statistics (2004). Census 2001: Report on the Welsh Language. London: TSO. Perrins, Daryl (2000). This town ain’t big enough for the both of us. In: Wales on Screen (ed. Steve Blandford), 152–167. Bridgend: Seren Press. Richards, Jeffery (1997). Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rowland, Paul. (2006). ‘Storm over S4C’s controversial new show’. Wales Online, 4 January. Available at: www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales‐news/storm‐over‐s4cs‐controversial‐ new‐2356601 (accessed 7 September 2014). Smith, Dai (1984). Wales! Wales? London: George Allen and Unwin. Smith, Dai (1999). Wales: A Question for History. Bridgend: Seren Press. Stanton, Gareth (2002). New Welsh cinema as postcolonial critique? Journal of Popular British Cinema 5: 77–89. StatsWales. (2015). ‘Welsh language’. Available at: https://statswales.wales.gov.uk/v/ BEZK (accessed 1 February 2015). Walford Davies, Hazel (ed.) (2005). Now You’re Talking: Drama in Conversation. Cardigan: Parthian Books. Whitfield, Esther (2011). Empire, nation and the fate of a language: Patagonia in Argentine and Welsh literature. Postcolonial Studies 14 (1): 75–93. Williams, Chris (2005). Problematizing Wales: an exploration in historiography and postcoloniality. In: Postcolonial Wales (ed. Jena Aaron and Chris Williams), 3–22. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.



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Williams, Daniel (2003). Introduction: the return of the native. In: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (ed. Daniel Williams), xv–lii. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Williams, Glyn (1975). The Welsh in Patagonia. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Williams, Kathryn. (2014). ‘Human Traffic: Director Justin Kerrigan reminisces 15 years on from the Cardiff clubbing classic’. The Western Mail (1 May). Available at: www. walesonline.co.uk/whats‐on/human‐traffic‐director‐justin‐kerrigan‐7059590 (accessed 30 July 2015). Williams, Raymond (2003). Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (ed. Daniel Williams). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Wood, Jason and Haydn Smith, Ian (2015). New British Cinema: From Submarine to 12 Years a Slave. London: Faber and Faber. Woodward, Kate (2003). Small nation  –  big screen: film in Wales during the 1990s. In: Nationalisms: Culture and the State (ed. J. Gifford and G. Zezulka‐Mailloux), 189–197. Edmonton: CRC Computing Studio. Woodward, Kate (2006). Traditions and transformations: film in Wales during the 1990s. The North American Journal of Welsh Studies 6 (1): 48–64. Woodward, Kate (2012). The desert and the dream: film in Wales since 2000. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (3): 413–433.

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Screening Irish‐America Ruth Barton

When I initiated the project that would culminate in the reader, Screening Irish‐ America (2009), I was developing a set of ideas that had informed my earlier Irish National Cinema (2004). There I had argued that confining the definition of Irish cinema to films made within or even about the territory of Ireland was to ignore the influence of the massive Irish diaspora on images of Ireland and the Irish. A seminar at Boston College (in March 2006) and a conference held at University College Dublin (in April 2007) confirmed a wider academic interest in the topic. Since then, a number of publications have emerged addressing various aspects of Irish‐American culture and identity, notably Stephanie Rains’s The Irish‐American in Popular Culture (Rains 2007) and Sinéad Moynihan’s ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish‐American Culture (Moynihan 2013). Screening Irish‐America did not come out of a void; by the time of its publication, it was a common argument that the failure of the emergent state to develop a local industry meant that images of Ireland created by exogenous filmmakers were disproportionately influential in determining the country’s cinematic inheritance. Only from the mid‐1970s did local filmmaking come into its own and that in turn was often motivated by a desire to make films that disrupted that exogenous legacy. What was new about Screening Irish‐America was that so many of its contributors discussed Irish‐American cinema as a tradition of filmmaking in itself, not just as the oppositional other to local Irish cinema. The project was given greater currency by increasing official and public interest in the diaspora. Most commentators will agree that the concrete expression of this was the 1990 announcement by newly‐elected President of the Republic, Mary Robinson, that she would be placing a candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin (her official residence) to remember the Irish diaspora and as a welcome home beacon. With

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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the onset of the recession, following the demise of the Celtic Tiger economy, the Irish diaspora took on a new significance as the Republic reached out to its still‐ wealthy subjects in the hopes that they would invest in the country. In July 2011, for instance, the government announced that people living abroad who do not qualify for Irish citizenship but would like their Irish roots acknowledged could apply for a ‘proof of Irishness certificate’, a move that one may expect to form the basis for a new entry in the long catalogue of cinematic and other comedies about homesick Yanks returning to the misty country of their dreams and the dreams of their forefathers. This chapter will discuss the key figures and films that constitute the history of Irish‐American representations and the lineage of research that led up to the ­publication of Screening Irish‐America. Further, I will offer some suggestions for directions that research might take into the future. By going back to the early histories of Irish‐American filmmaking, one can see how writing on the subject has evolved from the wish to construct an archaeology of Irish‐American films, stars, and directors, to a highly theorised discipline that has an influential part to play in ethnic and diasporic studies.

Historical Approaches Early writers on Irish‐American cinema were primarily concerned with establishing a history of representation and retrieving ‘lost’ Irish figures from the Hollywood past. The first such publication, Anthony Slide’s The Cinema and Ireland (1988), ­provides an overview of Irish cinema history generally, with two chapters devoted to Irish‐America. Taking as his starting point an article by Johnstone Craig from Photoplay of October 1918, entitled ‘The Dominant Race’, Slide (p. 73) notes that performers such as John Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, J. Warren Kerrigan, Francis X. Bushman, Enid Markey, Tom Mix, and ‘even Dorothy and Lillian Gish’ claimed to be Irish and ‘yet not one of these performers was born in Ireland and few had parents born on the Emerald Isle’. As Joseph Curran and others would do, Slide lists the archetypes of Irish identities on screen – the priest, the smiling c­ olleen, the fighting rogue, the adventurer, the gangster – claiming too the Irish cowboy – ‘epitomized by the all‐American John Wayne, most of whose characters have had Irish‐ American backgrounds’. Slide (1988, p. 79) is dismissive of John Ford’s Irish films – ‘His vision of Ireland was that of a poet, but a decidedly second‐rate poet, whose view was often patronizing and boorish’ – and particularly the later works, The Rising of the Moon (1957) and Young Cassidy (co‐directed with Jack Cardiff, 1964). Slide’s reservations regarding the ‘true’ Irishness of certain of his subjects echoes popular amusement at the practices of roots heritaging. It is also reflective of an era when the boundaries of the nation were widely seen to coincide with

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those of the State. Put simply, those who lived in Ireland were Irish, others were not, even if they said they were. One may guess too that it was The Quiet Man ( John Ford, 1952) that really suggested Ford’s second‐rateness to Slide. This film above all others has dominated discussions of the representation of Ireland by outside filmmakers and I will be returning to it shortly. Joseph M. Curran’s Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen (1989), published a year later, continued Slide’s project of cataloguing Irish directors and actors in the Hollywood industry, adding a proliferating number of names and performances. Curran’s research unearthed a wealth of Irish‐themed films dating back to the silent era. Many were immigrant narratives  –  How Molly Malone Made Good (Lawrence B. McGill, 1915), A Son of Erin ( Julia Crawford Ivers, 1916)  –  while others such as A Sprig of Shamrock (Harry Beaumont, 1915) suggested an Irish theme, even if little of this was evident. He lists many of the same actors as Slide, including the Moore brothers (Tom, Owen and Matt) from County Meath, Maureen O’Hara and Maureen O’Sullivan. Although much of Curran’s book is concerned with providing a taxonomy of the Irish behind and in front of the camera, he usefully links the changes in characterisation, from knockabout proletarians to respected figures of society, notably priests and police, to the improving social circumstances of Irish immigrants and to the influence of Irish pressure groups, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He further discusses the part played by the Catholic Legion of Decency and individuals such as Rev. Daniel Lord, Martin J Quigley (publisher of Exhibitors Herald‐World) and Joseph Breen in the implementation of the Production Code of the 1930s and by extension in Hollywood’s configuration of screen morality. Anticipating another common interpretation of Irish‐American screen characters, Curran writes: Having shown their value as brokers and mediators between the WASPs and other immigrant groups in areas like politics, labor, and religion, the Irish were now enlisted for the same role on the screen  –  transmitting as well as receiving ­assimilationist attitudes and values. (1989, pp. 36–37)

Curran’s analysis of John Ford’s career is more nuanced than Slide’s, insisting on the importance of understanding the influence of the director’s Irish background on his filmmaking. He further argues that his boozing, brawling males were a product of his ethnic inheritance, and did much to perpetuate the stereotype of the hard‐drinking, pugnacious Irishman within Hollywood cinema. Curran discusses influential films of the classic period, notably Irish‐American Leo McCarey’s Going My Way (1944). His comment (p. 57), that part of its appeal was that it was in essence ‘neither Catholic nor especially religious’, highlights another of the ­tensions around Irish‐American screen narratives. Being identified as Catholic in a predominantly Protestant society was to be defined as Other, one whose allegiances were questionable. Could a Catholic be loyal both to Rome and to



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Washington? How were Protestants to respond to the celibacy of the priesthood and the alien rituals of the mass? In part, assimilation was to take care of this issue. Actors such as the two Kellys  –  Gene and Grace  –  with their wholesome all‐American good looks and confidence reflected a new generation of Irish‐American performers whose careers were not defined by their ethnic identities. Only as he reached his conclusion did Curran (1989, p. 119) note a disturbing new trend in the portrayal of Irishness. In Joe ( John G. Avildsen 1970), for instance, Peter Boyle plays the eponymous Joe Curran as a ‘caricatured bigot that puts the Ku Klux Klan to shame’, while James Cagney’s return to the screen in Ragtime (Miloš Forman 1981) as the cold‐blooded racist Police Commissioner Rhineland Waldo, alongside Kenneth Macmillan’s Willie Conklin, the white supremacist captain of the Emerald Isle Volunteer Fire Company, suggested that Irish characters had become so ensconced in American narratives that they were now establishment targets. Writing in 1994, Kevin Rockett developed these earlier studies by focusing more particularly on how new immigrants were portrayed in early American cinema. While he too recognises the proliferation of Irish characters in these films, he insists that their absence from the organisation of the industry meant that the Irish had little or no control over how they were represented. Covering themes of immigration, domestic life, social mobility, political corruption, and job occupation, his essay, ‘The Irish Migrant and Film’ (Rockett 2009), runs from the early silent period to the present. The early films, he writes, may have had an overtly assimilative message, but this did not prevent them from rehearsing numerous familiar stereotypes, notably those of the hapless maid, the incompetent labourer, the fighter, and the corrupt politician. There is perhaps another angle on this narrative that comes to mind when reading Rockett’s essay. While the Irish were undoubtedly victims of racist stereotyping, did they not also collude in it? How better to ­distinguish yourself as upwardly mobile than by laughing at old stereotypes of your national identity? Moving into the sound era, Rockett also notes the influence of the Irish Catholic Church on film censorship. Discussing the film career of John Ford (2009, pp. 31–32), he unhesitatingly places him at the centre of representations of Irish‐ America. Rockett also notes that Ford remains one of the few directors to depict the Irish settling in rural America, that is until Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992). By the late 1960s, however, Rockett concludes that the only way of distinguishing Irish characters was by their names – ‘Popeye’ Doyle, for instance, in The French Connection films and the firefighters in Backdraft (Ron Howard 1991). Unlike Curran, he ends on this note of ethnic fade, writing that the Irish in America were now so de‐ethnicised as to be interchangeable with other traditions, even with White Anglo‐Saxon Protestants (WASPs). If there is one point of agreement between these writers and others to come, it is on the pre‐eminence of James Cagney in articulating the identity of the new

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urban Irish. Curran speaks for all three when he locates Cagney at the heart of the immigrant narrative, arguing that by 1941, when the former rose to become the highest paid actor in the world: He had done a great deal to create the screen persona of the urban antihero and define the image of the urban American, giving both Irish Americans and the idea of ethnicity new stature on the screen and in American life. (1989, p. 46)

Analysing Irishness If this first wave of writings was primarily focused on the presence of Irish‐ Americans on and behind Hollywood screens, the next wave was to concern itself with analysing that heritage and its evolution. Perhaps surprisingly, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the influence of Catholicism on Irish‐ American themed films, other than through the vehicle of censorship. The exception is Lee Lourdeaux’s Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese. Published in 1990, the book coincides with the initial wave of publications on the Irish in Hollywood, but is distinctive from them in its focus. Distinguishing his scholarship from the ‘images of ’ model, Lourdeaux argued that the filmmakers in his study displayed an identifiable Catholic aesthetic in their key works. Acknowledging his debt to Leo Braudy’s (1986) essay ‘The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese’, and its discussion of the transcendental  –  an emphasis on visual materiality rather than verbal mystery  –  as an essential component of the Catholic vision of the world, Lourdeaux (1990, p. 15) identifies ­communion, mediation, and sacramentality as the basic principles of Catholic identity. Of these, communion is the most straightforward, its material expression being the Catholic parish, and its social expression the ethnic community. Thus, the Irish‐American neighbourhood is both a physical and a symbolic space. These neighbourhoods delimit Irishness, and create one of its most consistent tensions, that is, between communality and individuality (1990, pp. 22–23). Mediation, a sacrament that reconciles individuals to God and society, is effected through the figure of the confessor, usually but not necessarily a priest (1990, pp. 17–18), and allows for the return of the sinner to society, or the penitent to the beloved. In common with Curran and others, Lourdeaux notes that the priest was a key figure in Irish‐American cinema of the classic period, also arguing that the most successful of these films (works such as Boys Town [Norman Taurog, 1938] and Going My Way) characterised their priests more as social workers than as devotional servants of God. Sacramentality, Lourdeaux acknowledges, is the most difficult to define, but is most readily understood as seeing the Divine in all things. Thus, ‘Catholics, unlike Protestants,



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do not feel compelled to choose between the world and God, rather God’s ­revelation is mediated through the world’ (Lourdeaux 1990, p. 18). Sacramentality is expressed in film not just through the symbols of the sacrament (baptism or a crucifix) but through dance, song, and ritual. Transferring these concepts to the cinema of John Ford, Lourdeaux argues that Ford not only celebrated communality in his cinema, but also enjoyed it as part of his work practice, building up around him a community of workers to whom he returned time and again to create his films. In this, he cast himself as the mediator, even a priest‐like figure, reconciling his company with the fictional world of the film, and his WASP audiences with his Irish and Irish‐American characters and settings. These characters include another three figures familiar from Catholicism: Mary Magdalene, the Mater Dolorosa, and the betrayer Judas (1990, p. 91). In particular, the redemptive Irish mother is a familiar figure in Ford films, most unmistakably in The Informer (1935) but right through his work, including, for ­instance, Maureen O’Hara’s Mary O’Donnell in The Long Gray Line (1955), who is cast as a symbolic mother to the West Point cadets. The other defining icon of Ford’s cinema is, of course, his Monument Valley settings, a space that, Lourdeaux argues (1990, pp. 94, 118), he imbued with sacramentality, where Nature was alive with spiritual presence, and which forms the background for the communal actions and mediation of his characters. Lourdeaux’s argument is compelling, and his move away from the ‘images of ’ model particularly useful. It would be senselessly schematic to attempt to apply it to all Irish‐American films, but its interweaving of social history, auteurism, and  aesthetics allows for a complex understanding of the distinctive nature of Irish‐American image‐making

John Ford and The Quiet Man For Irish scholars, it is The Quiet Man that remains Ford’s key production. Its knockabout humour, its sentimental, bucolic depiction of the people of the West of Ireland and its redemptive narrative of the returned immigrant all mark it out as the quintessential outsider’s vision of Irish life. When an indigenous Irish cinema belatedly came into existence in the 1970s, this was the film against which local directors held up their own deconstructive, harsh depictions of rural Ireland. Bob Quinn’s Poitín (1977), Jim Sheridan’s The Field (1990), and Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s December Bride (1991) consciously re‐work The Quiet Man in order to question issues of criminality, the rural economy, land ownership, and gender identities. As we have seen, the first wave of writers on Irish‐American cinema found themselves unable to celebrate Ford’s cinema without certain provisos. Even Lourdeaux, who  regarded Ford with admiration, was to find The Quiet Man unpalatable.

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Scholarship on the film turned a corner with Luke Gibbons’s recuperative reading of it in Cinema and Ireland, where he argued that visual constructions such as the overly fake backdrop to the bridge where Sean Thornton ( John Wayne) and Michaeleen Og Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald) pause as the latter realises just who his passenger is are a clue to Ford’s own acknowledgment of the constructedness of his immigrant’s view of the old country: It is this ability of certain strains in Irish romanticism to conduct a process of self‐ interrogation, to raise doubts at key moments about their own veracity, which cuts across any tendency to take romantic images as realistic accounts of Irish life. This suggests that it is not so much realism which offers a way out of the impasse of myth and romanticism, but rather a questioning of realism or any mode of representation which seems to deny the gap between image and reality. ­ (Rockett et al. 1987, p. 200)

Over and again, writers return to this film, and Luke Gibbons (2002) has developed his own initial analysis of it in his contribution to the ‘Ireland into Film’ series. One of the few writers to draw productively on Lourdeaux’s insights into Ford’s work, Martin McLoone considers the evolution of Ford’s Irish‐themed films and Irish characters as an expression of the director’s own ‘radical conservatism’. McLoone, in common with Timothy Meagher (below), returns to the roots of the Irish immigrant experience as a success story played out at the expense of other immigrant ethnic groups. This conservatism was, however, offset by successful acts of rebellion against the majority WASP establishment through organised labour. That history, of conservatism and rebellion, he argues (McLoone 2000, p.  52), informs Ford’s ‘gallery of boisterous rogues, drunks, rebels and feisty females’. McLoone echoes Gibbons in singling out certain key sequences where The Quiet Man can be seen to be playfully signalling its own artifice (Figure 28.1). The one dissenting voice in this recuperative movement is that of John Hill. In a piece written for but not included in Cinema and Ireland (Rockett et al. 1987) and now published in The Quiet Man … And Beyond (Crosson and Stoneman 2009), Hill prefaces his original essay with a new introduction in which he contends that the film is less subversive than its defenders would have it. Thus, its symbolic acts of resolution, notably the concluding Donnybrook, gloss over the community’s actual material problems. Of these, the most obvious inequity is in gender relations. Addressing a sequence that uniformly alienates contemporary viewers of the film, where Sean Thornton drags Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) by her hair through the fields, Hill argues that this action is consistent with a Fordian worldview in which women are necessarily subservient to men. Further, the celebration of community serves to disguise the uncomfortable contradictions of the Irish social order. Ultimately, in this reading, The Quiet Man ‘works to suppress class, sectarian, gender and regional divisions in favour of the essential unity of the nation/community’ (Hill 2009, p. 195).



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Figure 28.1  Reproducing or subverting Irish stereotypes?: The Quiet Man (1952).

How the Irish Became White Aside from Lourdeaux’s aesthetic reading of Ford’s films, the dominant model of analysis has been cultural/historical. Indeed, much of the debate on The Quiet Man outlined above divides along the fault lines of aesthetics versus ideology. Most writers agree with Curran that the Irish of the mid‐twentieth century became elevated to models of successful immigration, notably through their willingness to assimilate. Thus, the decreasing visibility of Irish characters on Hollywood screens has been widely understood to reflect their increasing assimilation into the dominant culture. The rise of whiteness studies gave a new lease of life to the discipline and provided a theoretical model for analysing both the historical positioning of the Irish within American society and new formations of belonging within contemporary America. As a number of scholars have argued, whiteness was forged at the turn of the twentieth century as diverse ethnic groups arrived in the United States and needed to distinguish themselves from people of colour (Roediger 1991; Jacobson 1998). For such groups, whiteness could not be assumed but must be earned; nor could it be taken for granted, but was always contingent, in need of constant renewal. The most influential of the studies of the Irish during this period (and slightly earlier) is Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, published in 1995.

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Discussing a number of key historical moments of the late nineteenth century ­clustered around abolitionism, he argued that whiteness for the Irish was not biologically determined but a result of choices made from among available alternatives. The Irish became white by distinguishing themselves from, primarily, African‐Americans, in a manner that was systematic, violent, and undemocratic. This inheritance has become an inescapable factor in discussing Irish‐American identity politics in eras increasingly removed from those of Ignatiev’s focus. Subsequent writers have also questioned to what extent it was in the interests of the dominant majority that the Irish achieve whiteness, and what Irish whiteness has signified over time. While some of the contributions to the whiteness debate have been unproductively harnessed to binaries and taxonomies  –  who’s white, who’s not – the concept has been useful as a model for developing the framework around assimilation. The writer who has most consistently applied this conceptual model to Irish‐ American cinema is Diane Negra. Her first contribution to the field was a chapter on Colleen Moore in her 2001 publication Off‐White Hollywood. In an argument informed equally by star studies, Negra argues that the silent‐era performer was elevated to a model of ethnic assimilation, one predicated on the idealisation of the kind of traditional values Moore allegedly embodied. In the age of the flapper, she became the epitome of childlike innocence and charm: ‘the figure of the Irish Colleen, a constituent element in the actress Colleen Moore’s persona, served as a comforting return to natural and unproblematic femininity’ (Negra 2001, p. 26). In the 1920s, Negra argued, Irishness was increasingly valued as a safe ethnicity as a new influx of lesser‐valued Eastern and Southern Europeans arrived in America. Both in her performances and in the accompanying publicity material, Moore was consistently portrayed as spontaneous and natural, somehow essentially Irish, a trait copperfastened through marriage to producer, John McCormick, another ‘Irisher’ (Negra 2001, p. 29). As Negra notes, Moore was repeatedly cast in Cinderella narratives. The adaptability of Irish female stars to this genre is the subject of two essays in Screening Irish‐America: Gwenda Young’s ‘Funny Girls: Early Screen Comediennes and Ethnicity’ (2009) and Christopher Shannon’s ‘The Bowery Cinderella: Gender, Class and Community in Irish‐American Film Narrative’ (2009). Contrasting the careers of Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford, Young argues that the former was to become associated with the prevalent stereotypes of the Irish as impetuous, unstable, and emotional while Pickford deliberately promoted herself as benefiting from another set of Irish stereotypes: ‘hard work, resilience, humour and matriarchy/mothering’ (Young 2009, p. 65). Both were comediennes, as was Colleen Moore, their humour often put to work to puncture WASP pretensions. In common, too, with Moore, when Normand and Pickford appeared in Irish‐themed narratives (Molly‐O′ (F. Richard Jones, 1921), in the case of the former; Amarilly of Clothes‐Line Alley (Marshall Neilan, 1918) and The Hoodlum (Sidney Franklin, 1919)



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in the case of the latter), the dramatic conflict was frequently configured as a choice between Irish familial structures and upward social mobility. Picking up on  this theme, Shannon (2010, p. 77) argues that in Irish ‘Bowery Cinderella’ ­narratives, ‘the Bowery Cinderella most often rejects her Prince Charming for a local boy, affirming the values of place and community against the allure of upward mobility’. His interpretation of the ending of Amarilly as reflecting this dynamic, however, conflicts with Young’s who sees the final image of the young couple with their two children out on his motorbike and sidecar for a ride in the countryside as symbolic of a shift from the tenements to the emerging middle class. Young has developed her ideas in a subsequent paper, where she looks at how Irishness was represented in fan magazines of the 1920s. Mindful of the response of pressure groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians to negative stereotypes of the Irish, magazines such as Photoplay participated in the construction of an Irishness in which the volatile temperament and ‘dreaminess’ of the race, far from being evidence of a shiftless, work‐shy nature, equipped them with the skills necessary for the creation of the new medium of moving pictures. (Young 2014)

The fan magazines’ definition of Irishness (which included directors with little more than an Irish‐sounding name, such as James P. Hogan, and others, like James Cruze, with even less to suggest an Irish background) returns us to the earlier dilemma of where the boundaries of national identity lie. Yet, as Young and Negra demonstrate in their research, Hollywood was extremely receptive towards Irishness, particularly in the early and silent era. Their work has provided a useful counterpoint to earlier discussions of negative stereotyping, nuancing the argument around Hollywood’s representations of the Irish. It is overly reductive to suggest that for every drunken Paddy there was a resourceful Amarilly, but certainly there is more to early cinema than a set of knockabout Irish characters inherited from vaudeville.

Irishness After 9/11 The notion that the Irish gradually faded away from Hollywood narratives as their symbolic value as new and assimilating immigrants was erased received a sudden jolt in the wake of 9/11 when American society was forced to recognise that not all ethnics were, to borrow a phrase from Michael Novak, ‘meltable’. For Novak in the 1970s, this was a rallying cry for a white ethnic revival in the face of the Civil Rights movement. He was also writing at a time when older ethnic practices were being discussed as symbolic (participation in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, for instance) rather than arising out of lived experience (Novak 1972; Gans 1979).

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Indeed, one could argue that it was this retrieval of a recidivist white ethnicity that informs the Irish‐themed films of the 1970s that so surprised Curran, with Irishness now standing in for a kind of hyper‐masculine whiteness. The attacks on the World Trade Center and other sites of 9/11 sharply reinvigorated the debate on just how assimilated ethnics in America were. They also ­revivified Irish screen fictions: The Wire [2002–2008], Rescue Me (2004–2011), Brotherhood (2006–2008), In Treatment (2008–2010), Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), Blue Bloods (2010–), The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006), Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007), The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010). Discussing the new visibility of Irish characters on screen post‐9/11, Diane Negra concluded that Irishness now served as a way of celebrating whiteness, particularly white masculinity, without the stigma of WASP associations. In terms of the Boston‐set films, specifically The Departed, she further analyses their mood as one of nostalgia for the old certainties of neighbourhood and community (Negra 2006). In many ways, these recent ­productions return writers to where they started. Just as the early films of the twentieth century concerned themselves with issues of place and space, of gender identities, ­ethnicity, and class mobility, so too has the recent spate of films and television series. Now, however, scholars can look back over a century and more of screen representations and a highly‐theorised history of immigration. Writing in the wake of 9/11, Timothy Meagher (2006, p. 633) tried to make sense of this history. Had allegiance to the ethnic neighbourhood, the milieu of James Cagney and Going My Way, worked against the achievement of upward mobility? How was it possible to reconcile the narrative of becoming white, and the ‘narrow‐minded and selfish politics, and even nasty racism’ that it entailed, he wondered, with the communalism that motived the selfless actions of the firemen and women who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center with no assurances that they would emerge alive? How could it be that ‘[T]hrough films from Ragtime and True Confessions to L.A. Confidential and in television shows as diverse as Seinfeld and Homicide: Life on the Street, Irish‐American men have become consensus icons of reactionary racial attitudes in America?’ These sudden about‐turns, where the portrayal of Irish masculinity in particular alternates between damning critique and ethnicity of choice demonstrates just how malleable screen Irishness is as a symbolic identity. This malleability has also ensured its longevity. Long after most Irish‐Americans have seen claims to an undiluted ethnic heritage lost through marriage and descent, their fictional alter‐egos retain what are apparently consensual Irish identity traits. Just what these traits mean at any one moment within the wider society and why they are being so deployed remain a source of some considerable interest for scholars of Irish‐ America. Screening Irish‐America provided a panoply of responses to this history of representation. Since its publication, many more scholarly works have been added to the reading list, including, apart from those discussed above, Adrian Frazier’s Hollywood Irish. John Ford, Abbey Actors and the Irish Revival in Hollywood (2011), Gary Rhodes’s Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012) and Christopher



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Shannon’s Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (2010). My own earlier volume, Acting Irish in Hollywood (Barton 2006), examined issues of mobility and star personae across a selection of Irish performers and stars working out of Hollywood. Considerable scope remains for further research – in comparative studies of screen representations of the Irish in other territories (Britain, Canada, and Australia, for example), in gender studies, most specifically the role of women in Irish‐American narratives, of the Irish behind the screen particularly in the early and silent era (to which my critical biography of Rex Ingram, Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (Barton 2014) is just one contribution), of the evolving relationship between Irishness and whiteness, Irishness and Catholicism, and Irishness and social and spatial mobility. Debates around the relationship between Irishness and other working‐class identities, and the insider/outsider nature of Irishness remain on‐going. By now, Irishness is surely over‐represented on screen, but as long as this remains the case, then we can look forward to considerably more scholarship in this evolving discipline.

References Barton, Ruth (2004). Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge. Barton, Ruth (2006). Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Barton, Ruth (ed.) (2009). Screening Irish‐America. Representing Irish‐America in Film and Television. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Barton, Ruth (2014). Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Braudy, Leo (1986). The sacraments of genre: Coppola, de Palma, Scorsese. Film Quarterly 39: 17–31. Craig, Johnstone (1918). The dominant race. Photoplay: October, 48. Crosson, Seán and Stoneman, Rod (eds.) (2009). The Quiet Man … and Beyond: Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland. Dublin: Liffey Press. Curran, Joseph M. (1989). Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies. New York: Greenwood Press. Frazier, Adrian (2011). Hollywood Irish: John Ford, Abbey Actors and the Irish Revival in Hollywood. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Gans, Herbert (1979). Symbolic ethnicity: the future of ethnic groups and cultures in America. Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1): 1–20. Gibbons, Luke (2002). The Quiet Man. Cork: Cork University Press. Hill, John (2009). The Quiet Man: Ford mythology and Ireland. In: The Quiet Man … and Beyond: Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland (ed. Seán Crosson and Rod Stoneman), 178–199. Dublin: Liffey Press. Ignatiev, Noel (1995). How the Irish Became White. London: Routledge. Jacobson, Matthew Frye (1998). Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lourdeaux, Lee (1990). Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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McLoone, Martin (2000). Irish Film. The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Meagher, Timothy J. (2006). The fireman on the stairs: communal loyalties in the making of Irish America. In: Making the Irish American, History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (ed. J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey), 609–648. New York: New York University Press. Moynihan, Sinead (2013). ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish‐American Culture. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Negra, Diane (2001). Off‐White Hollywood. London: Routledge. Negra, Diane (2006). The Irish in Us. Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Novak, Michael (1972). The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. Politics and Culture in the Seventies. New York: Macmillan. Rains, Stephanie (2007). The Irish‐American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Rhodes, Gary (2012). Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Rockett, Kevin (1996). The Irish Filmography, Fiction Films, 1896–1996. Dublin: Red Mountain Press. Rockett, Kevin (2009) (orig. 1994). The Irish migrant and film. In: Screening Irish‐America. Representing Irish‐America in Film and Television (ed. Ruth Barton), 17–44. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke, and Hill, John (1987). Cinema and Ireland. London: Croom Helm. Roediger, David (ed.) (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. Shannon, Christopher (2009). The Bowery Cinderella: gender, class and community in Irish‐American film narrative. In: Screening Irish‐America. Representing Irish‐America in Film and Television (ed. Ruth Barton), 77–88. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Shannon, Christopher (2010). Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. Slide, Anthony (1988). The Cinema and Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Young, Gwenda (2009). Funny girls: early American screen comediennes and ethnicity. In: Screening Irish‐America. Representing Irish‐America in Film and Television (ed. Ruth Barton), 61–76. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Young, Gwenda (2014). ‘“The dominant race”? Irish Americans and “Irishness” in early Hollywood Publicity.’ Paper delivered at the 2014 ACIS/CAIS conference, University College Dublin.

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Transnational Strategies in British Cinema The Example of Slumdog Millionaire James F. English British Cinema as Transnational Cinema To speak of a cinema as transnational is not to discount the importance of national or global factors, but to focus attention on what occurs in between those two  scales of analysis.1 British cinema may be approached in terms of certain ­specifically national peculiarities: its interdependency with state‐funded televi‑ sion (Hill 1996; Holmes 2005; Andrews 2014); its staunch commitment to the representation of ‘social reality’ (Hill 1986; Lay 2002); its unusually strong ties to literary and theatrical traditions (Higson 2005; Street 2009, pp. 152–157); its deep involvement with national history, tourism, and the commodification of cultural heritage (Monk and Sargeant 2002; Higson 2003), and so on. At the same time, British cinema is clearly enmeshed in what, following Pascale Casanova (2005), may be conceived as the ‘world cinematic space’. This is not simply an aggregation of all the individual national cinemas but a common marketplace for their cultural, economic, and symbolic transaction, a ‘mediating area’ that imposes its own set of rules and establishes the general conditions and terms of struggle under which all nations must contend (Casanova 2005, p. 72). Its two principal axes are those of commerce and prestige: the one centred on Hollywood, distrib‑ uted through the multiplexes and imposing a standard of profit whose measure is box‐office gross; the other centred on Europe (Paris/Cannes), distributed through art houses and the festival circuit, and imposing a standard of artistic value whose measure is juried awards and academic recognition. Operating within this global space of competition and mediation are various kinds of transnational networks, which bear different relationships to the national cinemas they conjoin as well as to world cinema. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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These transnational networks are fundamental to the history of film, a medium that has always involved the flow of technology, talent, and product from country to country with attendant pressure to form predatory or enabling alliances (O’Regan 1999). France is known for its especially determined efforts to maintain the cultural identity of its cinema, but those efforts have from the start consisted in agreements, accords, and treaties with other countries, not in a programme of simple isolationism (O’Shaughnessy 2011). Indeed, it was France that formed the world’s first official transnational co‐production partnership, with Italy in 1949. Arrangements of this kind have become all the more imperative in the current era of multinational multi‐media conglomeration, which has created such massive vertically and horizontally integrated companies, and such extreme concentration of world box‐office revenue on a few blockbuster films, that even national players of significant scale may be swept from the field if they attempt to go it alone. Today, France holds official co‐production agreements with more than 50 countries, as well as being party to the multilateral European Convention on Cinematographic Co‐production. A recent study confirmed that European films produced on a transnational basis reach substantially wider audiences and realise higher profits than solo‐nation films (Kanzler et al. 2008). They also succeed better in symbolic terms, winning some 60–70% of top awards at the major international film ­festivals (Betz 2004)  –  where, despite their hybrid origins, transnationally co‐­produced films are still treated as exemplary products of individual countries and evidence of distinctive national achievement in the cinematic arts. In the case of Britain, therefore, it was never a question of whether to transna‑ tionalise but only of what transnational strategy to adopt in order to achieve a sustainable position in the world cinematic space. As is well known, Hollywood achieved its dominance of the world commercial axis before the end of the silent era. Recognising as early as 1910 that large‐budget multi‐reel dramatic feature films were becoming disproportionately more profitable than other genres or modes, promising outsized rewards to whichever studios most rapidly escalated the scale of their production, the major American studios took on levels of ‘sunk costs’ vastly higher than the British or European industries (Bakker 2005). The dis‑ tributional parity that had obtained between US and UK/European films in the first decade of the century collapsed in the second decade as audiences every‑ where expressed a strong preference for the high‐cost, long‐runtime American ­features. The greater demand for these films gave the Hollywood studios leverage to negotiate more advantageous contracts with distributors and to begin seizing oligopolistic control over international as well as domestic circuits of exhibition. As the largest secondary market, Britain was a prime target, and the British film industry soon found itself largely shut out of theatres in America and further ­marginalised at home. By the mid‐1920s, only 10 to 15 of the several hundred films produced in Britain each year were being released in the US, and domestic films rarely captured more than 5% of the screen time in Britain’s own theatres (Burton and Chibnall 2013, p. xx). When at the end of the decade the talkies



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eclipsed silent film, the non‐Anglophone cinemas gained a certain linguistic buffer against Hollywood in their domestic markets, and quickly moved to reinforce that barrier with national, transnational, and regional protections (Higson and Maltby 1999). But, for Britain, the challenge of converting to the more expensive and com‑ plex sound technology only further disadvantaged it vis‐à‐vis America. Some pro‑ tection was afforded by the British government’s distribution quotas, which allocated a certain share of screen time for domestic films; from the late 1920s to the mid‐1930s, the domestic fraction rose from 5% to 20 %. But the major US stu‑ dios countered by setting up subsidiary cinematic sweatshops in the UK to churn out cheap but nominally British ‘quota quickies’ (Chibnall 2007). The resultant glut of ‘B’ movies aimed at a captive domestic market obviously did nothing to raise Britain’s flagging cinematic reputation abroad. Lacking both economic and symbolic resources, its film industry seemed to be stranded in a no man’s land bet‑ ween the twin axes of world cinema. This predicament – the original and chronic crisis of British cinema – did not yield one single strategy of transnational repositioning, much less an unambigu‑ ously winning one. Rather, it produced competing templates, what we can think of as a transatlanticist strategy, on the one hand, and a glocal‐realist strategy, on the other. The subsequent history of Britain’s cinematic transnationalism has largely been shaped by the tension between these competing templates laid down in the 1930s, and the different cultural, economic, and aesthetic ambitions they entail. I will not attempt to reconstruct that entire history in this short chapter. My modest aim, rather, is to consider, via an admittedly circumambulatory route, the case of a single recent and well‐known film, Danny Boyle’s 2008 Slumdog Millionaire, situating it among various other films of the same year and tracing the circumstances of its production back through the longer history of British cine‑ matic transnationalism. The genesis and reception of Slumdog can help us to see the tight constraints under which British filmmaking must still operate in a Hollywood‐dominated world space, but also the advantages that have accrued from its unique strategic positioning.

Transatlantic Cinema as British Cinema Slumdog Millionaire, the eighth feature film by Danny Boyle, was a standout success by almost any measure. Winner of awards for best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography, and score at both the Oscars and the BAFTAs, it reaped countless other prizes around the world, from Norway and Russia to Australia and Japan, and including top honours from African‐American and women critics’ associa‑ tions. It generated an unusual volume of critical and journalistic attention, occasioned public debate and controversy, attracted academic study, and led to Boyle’s selection as director of opening ceremonies at the 2012 London Olympics,

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where his extravagantly staged vision of British history and culture reached an ­estimated one billion foreign viewers. Part of the hype around the film was due to its performance at the box office, where it earned nearly $400 million. This figure in itself is not all that ­remarkable. Other British films that same year earned considerably more: Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008), the second film in the rebooted James Bond franchise, made $600 million and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, the second film in the rebooted Batman franchise, took in one billion dollars. 2008 was a between‐pictures year for the Harry Potter franchise, but Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the year before, and Harry Potter and the Half‐Blood Prince the year after (both directed by David Yates), each came close to the billion‐ dollar mark, about average for that astonishingly successful series. The difference with Slumdog, of course, is that it is regarded as a genuinely British film, while the British‐made franchise blockbusters are seen as Hollywood productions whose status as ‘films of UK origin’ – to use the terminology of the British Film Institute – is a convenient industry fiction, or worse, a neo‐imperial ruse. Even Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008), adapted from a West‐End musical, written, directed, and produced by lifelong British theatre people, shot at Pinewood ­studios, with music recorded at Abbey Road and all post‐production and visual effects done in Soho, a film that out‐earned Slumdog and all the other films just mentioned at the British box office, even this quirky homegrown project by and for middle‐aged female ABBA fans was too reliant on Hollywood financing and too accommodating of the Hollywood model in scale, plot, casting, and visual aesthetic to be accepted as a genuine work of British cinema. The differences between Boyle’s film and these other popular successes of 2008 are real, as I will discuss below. But the stark binary of a genuine, ‘domestic’ British cinema versus films whose lifeblood is American and whose Britishness is sheer contrivance is unhelpful in a number of ways. To begin with, large industrial films closely entwined with American finance and distribution, consciously oriented towards the preferences of US audiences, and aligned with the prevailing Hollywood aesthetic, form a long and important line in British filmmaking. They are an indisputable part of the British cinematic tradition, as pioneered by Alexander Korda, Michael Balcon, Herbert Wilcox, and others in the 1930s. For  these filmmakers, the only route that offered a real chance for the British cinema to reverse its dwindling economic and symbolic fortunes and assume a place of some consequence in the world system was a transnational itinerary that began in America. When Balcon, director of Gaumont‐British, called for ‘a pro‑ duction policy ever less and less parochial and more and more international in appeal’, he meant, in the first instance, appeal to ‘the vast North American market’ (Richards 2010, p. 251). The most successful of the Gaumont films, The Tunnel (Maurice Elvey, 1935), was a science‐fiction adventure movie, largely set in a futur‑ istic New York, the lead roles taken by established Hollywood stars, and the whole package serving up a warm allegory of transatlantic unity. Korda likewise catered



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expressly to American tastes, focusing production on what he found to be the most exportable genres of historical costume drama – the royal bio‐pic and the imperial adventure film – and strategically casting Americans (Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River, 1935) or British actors already well known to American audiences (Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933) in lead roles. Wilcox ­emulated the Korda model with films about Queen Victoria (Victoria the Great, 1937, and Queen of Destiny, 1938) and Napoleon and Josephine (A Royal Divorce, Jack Raymond, 1938), all featuring actresses with an American following. All three men found it impossible to operate on the scale necessary to make these kinds of pictures without American financing.2 The very film that established the exportability of the large‐scale British historical drama, Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, was financed by United Artists, the non‐major American distribution company in which Korda eventually became a partner. Wilcox’s most successful film, Victoria the Great, had financing from RKO Radio, the American major that would have backed his company, Imperator, for the next decade if the war had not forced curtailment of that arrangement. Balcon tried hardest to stay independent of American distributors but by 1937 had given up on Gaumont’s shaky finances and was directly employed by MGM as head of their British subsidiary. The reliance on American funding is often perceived as an obvious and fatal weakness of this whole strategy of building the British cinema, the collapse of the production companies of the 1930s offering a cautionary tale to those who would have Britain pursue a junior partnership with Hollywood rather than fighting for true independence or joining forces with Continental neighbours in the struggle for ‘Film Europe’ over and against ‘Film America’. Balcon himself certainly came to see it this way. But it is a mistake to view the transatlantic template laid down in  the 1930s as one of ruinously narrowing ambitions, driving Britain into an economic and cinematic cul‐de‐sac. The strategy did, in fact, succeed in many respects, raising both the quantity and quality of domestic production, expanding exports to four times the level of the previous decade, yielding films of lasting ­reputation and influence, and gaining credibility for the British cinema not only in the US (where three British films were included in the New York Times top‐ten list for 1938) but in other countries as well (Street 2002, p. 88). The Private Life of Henry VIII was a true international hit, produced by a man far more cosmopolitan in out‑ look and with much deeper investment in the ideal of the international film than any of the American studio bosses (Walker 2003). Over the course of his career, Korda made important films in Budapest, Berlin, and Paris, and he brought to the UK a wealth of European contacts and expertise and an impulse to Europeanise British cinema which he saw as complementing, rather than contradicting, his efforts to transatlanticise it. What he strove for at London Film Productions was a mode of filmmaking just as massively exportable as Hollywood’s but more cultur‑ ally sophisticated and more worldly than what was possible in the American milieu. Nor was Korda altogether exceptional in this respect; if ‘internationalism’ became the watchword of British cinema in the 1930s in part because it

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conveniently euphemised the transatlantic turn, it did nonetheless mark a truly cosmopolitan impulse. Given Hollywood’s stranglehold on distribution, Britain’s transnational itinerary had to begin in America, but none of the decade’s interna‑ tionalists intended it to end there. As Sarah Street (2002, pp. 87–89) has argued, the transatlantic enterprises of the 1930s were finally upended by war rather than by any fundamental error of aim or approach, and their basic template for reposition‑ ing British cinema in the larger cinematic geography would be reactivated in the postwar years. A further reason to be cautious about dismissing today’s big‐budget co‐produc‑ tions as somehow less than or other than genuinely British cinema is that it can lead us to underestimate the substantial British inputs into the transatlantic machinery. Even the colossal film franchises, which have become so dominant a part of cinematic commerce in the twenty‐first century, are not simply products of neo‐imperial imposition. James Bond and Harry Potter are two of the most pow‑ erful icons of British popular culture, ubiquitous signifiers of Britain’s strong presence in the sphere of global art and entertainment. Derived from bestselling British book series, the franchise films stand in a long history of transatlantic adaptation in which Hollywood’s control of economic capital plays off against Britain’s control of cultural capital. Much of that history centres on ‘quality’ adap‑ tations from the approved canon of English letters, which circulate in Hollywood as evidence of popular cinema’s artistic legitimacy – appearing, for example, with disproportionate frequency among Academy Award nominations.3 But the American appetite for ‘classic’ British literature on screen has always extended beyond Shakespeare and Dickens to include the full range of popular genres, from the Gothic horror of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula to the detective fiction of Conan Doyle, the science fiction of Wells and the fantasy of Tolkien, the children’s stories of Kipling and Dahl, and the spy novels of Conrad, Greene, and Le Carré. British literary works of one sort or another have accounted for as many as half of the world’s top‐grossing films in recent years. While Fleming and Rowling are not Forster and Austen, the Bond and Potter novels are undoubtedly ‘English classics’ of a kind, books which, like the romantic spy novel The Scarlet Pimpernel adapted by Korda (1935), and unlike the usual ephemera of the bestseller lists, enjoy large trans‐generational readerships. As Simone Murray (2011) details in her work on the contemporary ‘adaptation industry’, today’s super‐franchises are elaborated across multiple platforms (from clothing store to theme park to internet service provider) with such complex and  systematic interdependency that only the very largest media conglomer‑ ates  –  Disney, Sony, Time Warner  –  can manage them. But the domination by US‐based multinationals should not blind us to Britain’s substantive role in the emergence and continued expansion of this hyper‐industrial form of production. It was the Bond franchise, launched in London by the purpose‐built company Eon Productions in 1961, that established the working prototype for today’s massive multiplatform book‐series adaptations. Within a decade of the first Bond film,



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Eon had extended the brand to comic books, trading cards, hit songs and soundtrack albums, novelisations of films, and a wide range of merchandise. Unlike the car‑ toon character merchandise Disney had been marketing since the 1930s, the Bond brand reached well beyond the children’s bracket to include a special edition Ford Mustang, a brand of vodka, lines of men’s clothing and accessories, beauty prod‑ ucts for women, and much else (Bennett 1983). To be sure, it is the major American studio Warner Bros (and its parent company Time Warner) that has raised this template to what Murray calls its ‘current apotheosis’, the comprehensively elabo‑ rated US$23 billion ‘brand umbrella’ of the Harry Potter franchise (Murray 2002). But J. K. Rowling has maintained a firm contractual grip on the casting (all British), shooting locations (all British), art direction (British), and most importantly on her (British) characters – meaning that the power to determine the future of the fran‑ chise, including any prequels or sequels or spin‐offs and side stories, lies with the British literary figure and not the American movie studio. We need, then, to be cautious about distinguishing Slumdog Millionaire from its big‐franchise contemporaries on the ground that these latter belong to some other cinematic tradition than Britain’s. They are in fact an important part of what British cinema is and does, and the most prominent current manifestation of a long‐standing transatlantic strategy. Other commercially successful films, produced on the same middle scale as Slumdog (between, say, £3 million and £30 million), may also be seen as extending this strategy. There are, for example, the romantic comedies and ‘new heritage’ dramas of Working Title Films, a company that since 1999 has been a wholly‐ owned subsidiary of Universal Pictures, itself a division of Comcast Corporation. As Michael Wayne (2006) points out in a severely critical reading of Working Title’s Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000), even the company’s small independent wing, WT2, which administratively stands at several layers of remove from American studio involvement, must be regarded as a transnational house, an institutional form of the transatlantic paradigm. Wayne shares with many critics a disdain for this paradigm, arguing that it affords British producers a bogus form of ‘opera‑ tional autonomy’ predicated on their having ‘internalized … the parent company’s longterm strategies’ and surrendered to ‘the logic of [capitalist] accumulation’ (Wayne 2006, p. 65). But, as I have been arguing, the British film industry was never a cultural space free from capitalist ambitions, requiring indoctrination by Hollywood in the allure of profit. Or, even if we wish to accept this stale Manichean fable, we would have to date the fatal moment of ‘internalisation’ to some 80 or 90 years ago. Certainly the evolution of Working Title from its start‐up days in the mid‐1980s, when it explored what Stuart Hall called Britain’s ‘new‐ethnicities’ (Hall 1996) with edgy films such as Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), to its present‐day production of a US$30 ­million historical melodrama such as Atonement ( Joe Wright, 2007), should not be read as an allegory for the ‘loss of cultural ambition’ in British cinema as a whole (Wayne 2006, p. 60). Cultural ambition of the kind generally recognised by

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academic critics tends to manifest at the sub‐industrial scale of those early films Working Title made for Channel Four; it is a truism of film studies that larger ­budgets mean less freedom to explore and experiment. But at least four times as many films are being made at the artisanal scale in Britain today as was the case in the 1980s (BFI 2005, p. 1; 2013, pp. 186–189). However comprehensively dismissive one might wish to be of the transatlantic strategy and its products – contesting the genuine Britishness not just of the Potter films and Quantum of Solace but of Atonement, Mamma Mia!, In Bruges, and other such mid‐scale co‐productions of 2007–2008 – there is scant basis for regarding the British industry’s growing capacity for such films as an impediment to more experimentally‐oriented filmmaking. 2008 was the year that saw release of Steve McQueen’s remarkable debut feature, Hunger, Terence Davies’ haunting memoir film Of Time and the City, and Shane Meadows’ black‐and‐white coming‐of‐age film Somers Town (one of a string of astonishing features and shorts from the tiny Sheffield production house, Warp Films). None of these is less ambitious in cultural or aesthetic terms than Frears’ films of the 1980s. To be sure, it remains difficult to get such films made, and more difficult still to get them exhibited. While they are in some senses more local and domestic in aspect than large‐scale films, they too must rely on complex transnational ­networks to supply their lifeblood. In particular, filmmakers working in Britain’s artisanal sector – its ‘art cinema’ – often depend upon European‐based production companies and/or European distributors for crucial support. Some even receive funding from the European Union (whose arts and media program is currently badged ‘Creative Europe’), though the UK’s transatlantic‐oriented film policies and ‘intense ambivalence’ towards the entire project of EU partnership have tended to work against this (Higson 2015). And while small‐budget experimental films are comparatively free from the imperative to yield profitable returns on investment, they face much greater pressure to succeed in symbolic terms, putting them at the mercy of a world‐cinema festival circuit and system of international awards that is again largely centred on Europe. Not just struggling indie newcomers and obscure avant‐gardists but Britain’s major auteurs have become deeply entwined in this Continental circuitry. Peter Greenaway has used the Netherlands as base for production (as well as country of residence) since his first forays into feature filmmaking in the 1980s. His work was celebrated with awards in Venice, Warsaw, Cannes, and elsewhere in Europe before it found recognition in London, and more than two decades before he received his first BAFTA. Ken Loach, who shares none of Greenaway’s conspicuously Continental aesthetic dispositions, has nonetheless by his own reckoning been ‘a European director’ since the early 1990s (Hill 1997, p. 164), when he and Sally Hibbin began consciously to stitch together a set of sustainable relationships with distributors in Europe to support their partnership in independent production company Parallax Pictures. The dramatic revival of what had been a floundering career for Loach was underwritten by the stable if modest financing provided by



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these Euro‐regional relationships together with the symbolic capital that began flowing in from the European coffers of cinematic prestige as the first Loach‐ Parallax film, Riff Raff (1991), won the Critics Award at Cannes as well as the Felix for Best European Film. In short, even if we credit them with more ‘cultural ambition’ than the large‐ scale transatlantic co‐productions, the artisanal strains of British cinema are not unambiguously ‘more British’, i.e. more perfectly domestic in tenor and less beholden to transnational forms of cinematic power. Nor, operating as they do along a European‐dominated symbolic axis of world cinematic space, are they directly competing with or imperilled by the US/UK coproduction sector, with its wholly economic focus on ‘inward investment’. The latter sector’s re‐expansion in recent decades, which has established London and its near environs as a world‑lead‑ ing centre for large‐scale studio production, post‐production, and visual effects, has tended rather to exert pressure on other would‐be world centres of commerce than to squeeze the margins of artisanal production at home.

Slumdog Millionaire as Glocal Realist Cinema So where does Slumdog Millionaire figure in this picture? Some reviewers and critics have pointed to its ‘Hollywood’ elements, especially its foregrounding of an ‘American game show’ and its dream‐factory happy ending, claiming the film ‘­represents a certain commercial genre of Hollywood movies’ (Sengupta 2013, p. 71). But Slumdog is not a film that conforms at all closely to the transatlantic paradigm. A comparatively small fraction (30%) of its costs was borne by American distributors, and even that arrangement was something of a belated compromise, shared out between Warner Bros and Fox Searchlight, neither of which saw enough North American commercial potential in the film to risk more than $2.5 million on it. In fact, had Fox not stepped in, Warner intended to send the film straight to DVD. The cast contains no Americans or actors known to American audiences, and nearly a quarter of their dialogue is spoken in Hindi with English subtitles, the purest of poisons for Hollywood. As scholarship on the film has increasingly shown, Slumdog bears stronger ­affinities with Bollywood than with Hollywood. In telling the story of Jamal, a ­destitute orphan from the poorest district of Mumbai who scraps his way past daunting obstacles to win riches, celebrity, and the girl of his dreams, the film sutures together aspects of the two main phases of Hindu cinema since the Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s: the angry young man films of the 1970s – the films which saw Amitabh Bachchan become a national icon of the ghetto‐dwelling working‐class rebel  –  and the ‘new Bollywood’ cinema of the 1990s, for whose comparatively anodyne narratives of and for the globalising Indian middle class A. R. Rahman composed a stream of hybrid world‐music soundtracks (Tieber 2013).

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Slumdog is eager to display these transnational influences. Amitabh Bachchan is referenced both explicitly  –  when his helicopter publicity tour has him touch down in the slums to sign autographs, a 10‐second montage of his best‐known roles flashes through the mind of young Jamal – and implicitly, inasmuch as he was the first host of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the game show that serves as the film’s main device for reconstructing Jamal’s life story, reuniting him with his childhood love, Latika, and making him rich. Rahman himself was recruited to compose the film’s score, which brought him his first widespread notice outside of India and the South‐Asian diaspora, including a pair of Grammy awards. But while Slumdog establishes many points of contact and exchange with Bollywood cinema, its transnationalism consists not so much in this ‘Bolly‐Brit’ fusion as in its connections to an enduring ‘glocal‐realist’ strategy in British ­filmmaking. This strategy again emerges at the original moment of structural crisis for British cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s when, taking an opposite route from the transatlanticism of Korda and Balcon, John Grierson proposed the ‘documentary’ mode of filmmaking as the best way for a national cinema to advance from the peripheries of a world system all too centred on Hollywood. It may seem counterintuitive to describe the British documentary movement as a transnational strategy. As developed by Grierson, Paul Rotha, and their peers, documentary was after all a rigorously localist cinematic practice, shaped by a desire to observe and exhibit ‘ordinary’, ‘actual’ Britons and the concrete particu‑ lars of their lived environments. In this, as in certain other respects (including its hostility to Bloomsbury and to Parisian high‐modernist aesthetics), the movement was typical of late British modernisms, participating in the inward or reflexively nationalist turn that Jed Esty (2003) has characterised as the self‐anthropologising tendency of a contracting empire, which redirects the ethnographic optic of colo‑ nialism onto its own ‘natives’. As Grierson once said, why seek out exotic savages in the ‘far places’ of the Earth when the ‘savages of Birmingham’ are ready to hand? (Rotha 1983, p. 319). This localism is apparent in a film such as Elton and Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935), co‐produced by Grierson’s sister Ruby. Here, observation of the slums means not only shots of the actual (but until then cinematically invisible) vermin‐ infested interior spaces, crooked, collapsing corridors, filthy common toilets, and so on that constituted home for all too many ‘ordinary’ working‐class Britons, but, just as important, verbal descriptions and commentary provided by those very people. As Rotha put it, documentary could not take its voice from the ‘inoffen‑ sive’, ‘well‐sounding persons’ of mainstream talking cinema but only from people ‘actually engaged [in the activities] with which the picture deals’ and possessing ‘different dialects according to the locations of the subject’ (Rotha 1952, p.165). The postwar legacies of this radical localism extend well beyond the documen‑ tary genre. In the films of the British New Wave, with their psychological scrutiny of the new ‘angrier’ working‐class generation of the 1950s, we see the privileging



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of authentic class and regional accents as well as the preference for shooting on location in urban slums, even in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), a film adapted from a London stage play but shot, by Walter Lassally, in grim sections of greater Manchester. Just after the New Wave, documentary was more aggressively merged into dramatic programming in the work of Peter Watkins, Ken Loach, and other filmmakers working at the BBC. Loach’s 1966 TV film Cathy Come Home was a programme precisely about ‘housing problems’ in working‐class areas of London, which combined scripted drama and professional acting with an emphat‑ ically ‘documentary look’: a roaming 16 mm camera, outside the studios, seizing on ‘found’ shots in unmolested urban locations, with voice‐over commentary from actual residents of overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing estates. This was just the kind of ‘directive’ filmmaking Grierson had championed, discovering within ordinary local particulars larger ‘patterns’ of national belonging and exclusion, and making these available for purposes of ‘civic education’ (Grierson 1966, p. 290). In subsequent decades a wide array of British directors has explored the possibilities of this documentary‐inflected and localist mode of social realism, from Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh to Patrick Keiller and Shane Meadows. Even the more expressionistic and ‘haptic’ work of Lynne Ramsay belongs to this tradition (Trotter 2008). Her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), filmed at a dilapidated estate on the banks of a toxic stretch of canal in Glasgow, once again confronts us, via the sometimes impenetrable vernaculars of local, non‐professional actors, with the human costs of the nation’s persistent failure to address the ‘housing problems’ of its urban poor. But the localism of this tradition is not the whole story. Deriving its formal and ideological tenets from abroad (from Soviet filmmakers and American communi‑ cations and public relations theorists, respectively), the documentary movement was from the start a worldly intervention. It emerged in response to the centripetal pressures of contractive empire, yes, but also and equally to the centrifugal pres‑ sures of world cinema and late‐imperial geopolitics. It advanced itself not just as a British strategy for evading the constraints imposed by Hollywood but as the pro‑ totype of a transformative and transnational parallel cinema, a cinema by and for the new citizens of social democracy everywhere – or, to put this less approvingly, as a new Ideological State Apparatus for emergent welfare‐capitalist states around the world. It was to be an effectively glocal form of cultural practice, not just more firmly anchored than other cinematic practices to the actual lived particulars of the national experience, but also consciously modelled for replication abroad: rep‑ lication not as Britain’s ‘national style’ but as a coherent, repeatable, and essentially low‐budget system or arrangement of basic productive elements. Rotha and Grierson were often divided, especially on questions of cinematic aesthetics, but they shared a belief that the specific pictures they were making mattered much less than the whole cohesive and economically affordable system of parallel pro‑ duction and distribution. It was this system or assemblage, the documentary ‘unit’, that for both men constituted the real achievement of the movement. Both men

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saw it as an exportable model for the production of localist practice: a system that could be installed on foreign ground, where the assemblage of basic productive elements and vectors of intention would absorb the necessary local inputs and assure the ‘movement’s’ further propagation. The goal, as Elizabeth Sussex has expressed it in suitably imperial language, was ‘to work for the extension of the territories occupied by the documentary rather than the development in depth of documentary itself ’ (1975 p. 211). It is an odd sort of strategic duplicity, this reality‐glocalism, visible not only in the establishment, partially under Grierson’s guidance, of foreign film units in Canada, Africa, Australia, and India, but in certain vectors of contemporary social‐ realist cinema and of ‘reality’ production in British screen culture more generally. We can see it readily in Loach, probably the most significant figure in the social‐ realist tradition, the filmmaker most unwaveringly committed to ‘making visible the working class’, to borrow John Hill’s classic formulation (Hill 1999, p. 135). This task, for Loach, has become an unavoidably transnational one as the notion of a rooted and homogeneous working‐class community gives way to the realities of a disaggregated global precariat. His mid‐career shift, noted above, onto the European axis of auteurist production was thus contrived in a way that would afford him maximum global transportability of his apparatus with minimum com‑ promise to his method. Over the last 30 years he has moved from one local site to another, making ‘docudramatic’ pictures, often using non‐professional actors filmed in situ, in seven or eight different countries. For Bread and Roses (2000), a political drama written by Paul Laverty about the Justice for Janitors movement in the USA, Loach brought his small crew to Los Angeles, where undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, sub‐minimum‐wage custo‑ dial workers actively involved in the unionisation effort, played key roles in the film as well as serving as extras in strike re‐enactment scenes alongside Los Angeles police officers who were likewise assuming roles continuous with their actual working lives. Michael Winterbottom takes this transnational docu‐realism still further in his 2002 film In This World, which treats the smuggling of stateless refu‑ gees into Europe. The two cousins whose perilous 4000‐mile journey the film presents are played by boys who had lived their entire lives as nationless subjects in the Shamshatoo refugee camp of northern Pakistan. Though semi‐scripted, the film involved multiple illegal border crossings assisted by actual people‐smugglers who do business at Shamshatoo. One of the young actors used a forged visa that Winterbottom’s crew had provided him for purposes of making the film to under‑ take a rogue dash to London in hopes of establishing residency in the UK, thus merging quite literally into his film role as an asylum seeker (Thorpe 2003). In keeping with their Griersonian roots, transnational docudramas like these are necessarily small‐scale, tending to be exhibited on the parallel circuit of the festivals and art houses, and aiming less for financial profit than for the symbolic rewards of the Europe‐centred world cinema. In This World won the Golden Bear at the Berlin



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Film Festival (where Loach received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014), but saw release on just ten screens in North America and negligible box office. There has also recently emerged, however, a hyper‐commercial variant of the glocal‐realist paradigm – created not for the theatre but for the small screen. The phenomenon of the reality TV ‘format’ might be regarded as the directive documentary movement’s monstrous offspring, its love child with commercial television. Emanating primarily from Britain, cheaply reproducible non‐scripted formats featuring ‘actual or ordinary’ individuals – Idols, Dancing with the Stars, Got Talent, X Factor, and so on – have dominated the world’s many television markets, including the American and domestic UK markets, for nearly two decades. In the year of Slumdog’s release, all five of the most watched shows in the US were British‐ origin reality programmes, as were three of the top five and seven of the top ten in Britain itself (none were American) – and this was not at all an atypical year. As with the transnational docudramatic films of Loach or Winterbottom, this tele‑ visual form of reality‐glocalism involves no signature UK look or style, no iconic British scenery à la the heritage dramas. On the contrary, the aim of the British glocal‐reality franchise is to keep Britishness out of view, to scrub the originating culture off the format so that there is maximum room for local cultural inputs to attach. Most Americans have no idea that American Idol, the country’s most watched as well as most profitable series every single year from 2003 until 2012, was created in London and licensed to the US by its British owners. To its many viewers it is quintessentially American, a show that ‘travels across the country in search of America’s next singing superstar’, auditioning local Bible‐Belt Christians, military men, former high‐school cheerleaders, and other ‘ordinary, actual’ Americans. Even among scholars, it is common to treat Idols, which exists in 46 versions broad‑ cast in more than 150 countries, as a prime example of Americanisation rather than of British transnational culture. Yet the US, which alone in the world can suc‑ ceed by simply exporting its own domestic screen entertainment, lags far behind Britain when it comes to creating reality formats for glocal dissemination. The deliberate cultural ‘neutrality’ of Britain’s glocal reality formats does not make them ideologically innocent. As noted above, the remit of the glocal produc‑ tion units envisioned by Grierson was to educate emergent citizenries in the shared responsibilities of British‐style welfare‐state democracy – an agenda predicated on the view that welfare‐state democracy must always be the most suitable and desir‑ able social destiny, whether for Canada or for newly independent nations of the Global South. In similar fashion, as the media theorists Hay and Ouillette (2008) have argued, today’s reality formats are training the world’s post‐welfare‐state citi‑ zenries to reject the old lessons in collective obligation and entitlement, and embrace the strictures of neoliberalism. Reality TV is still ‘directive’ program‑ ming. But it teaches ordinary people to accommodate themselves to the absence of social safety provisions, the ubiquity of sink or swim competition, and the dubious new consolations of celebrity, philanthropy, and miraculous windfall.

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Indeed, the most internationally successful and widespread of all the reality for‑ mats is the original windfall programme, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, with 81 licensed versions shown in over 100 countries and number‐one rated shows in more than 50. The show ran for 30 half‐year seasons in its home UK market and continues as a primetime hit in many of its glocal versions. The Indian Millionaire, hosted by Amitabh Bachchan and, like Slumdog, including Bollywood music and dance among its local inputs, commanded top ratings as recently as 2013, when it also made headlines for producing its first‐ever woman winner. The format was created by Celador, the London production house that also co‐financed Slumdog, in effect deploying the film as a two‐hour product placement for the leading British reality brand. The presence of Millionaire as overarching structural device of the film is thus not a ‘Hollywood‐style’ gimmick but a decisive mark of the film’s place in the evolving history of British glocal realisms. Boyle follows Loach, Winterbottom et  al. in extending transnationally the docudramatic practices and thematic emphases of the social‐realist tradition. But he does so in a way that accommo‑ dates the narrative logic and the directive import, the ‘civic lesson’, of Britain’s successful reality formats (Figure 29.1). That accommodation really began in the mid‐1990s when Boyle, along with Slumdog’s screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, helped to guide the social‐realist tradition onto the tracks of light entertainment. At the heart of the enterprise were Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) and The Full Monty (1997), directed by Peter Cattaneo from a Beaufoy script. Both were recognisable as social‐issue films, focusing on the ­predicaments of chronically unemployed males in the post‐industrial urban North. Trainspotting in particular retained much in the way of realist underpin‑ nings. Set in and around Edinburgh but shot for the most part in run‐down ­sections of Glasgow by Brian Tufano, who cut his teeth at the BBC as director of photography for Loach’s two‐part mining drama The Price of Coal (1975), the film

Figure 29.1  Glocal realism: British format, Indian inputs in Slumdog Millionaire (2008).



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highlighted problems of ‘underclass’ criminality, inadequate policing, substan‑ dard housing and hygiene, and widespread patterns of addiction and self‐harm. It  offered some graphic images of sickness and death among young urban slum‐dwellers in the Thatcher era. But like The Full Monty it added to its realist furniture a big up‐front soundtrack, lots of comic gags, and an ending in which the destitute protagonist enjoys an unlikely windfall of cash. To make Slumdog, Boyle exported this 1990s recipe for a repurposed realism of the northern working class to the Global South, gathering up a new set of local inputs from the street culture as well as the screen culture of Mumbai. The film is in some respects his most docudramatic, relying for key early sequences on jumpy, improvisational takes shot by Anthony Dod Mantle in the narrow back alleys of Dharavi with a single handheld digital camera, and featuring non‐professional actors in their native environment, speaking their local vernaculars. It presents horrific problems of local housing and sanitation, including Mumbai’s notorious hanging latrines, which drain directly into open waterways and are responsible for rampant diarrhoeal disease among children (Figure 29.2). Indeed, for many of its critics, the film is all too eager to display the urban poverty of the Third World. They place Slumdog in a long line of orientalist documentary and docurealist films that includes Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Born into Brothels (2004) and which attests to ‘the ongoing appeal of images of the slum’ in Western films ­purporting to show the ‘real India’ (Gehlawat 2013, p. 165). Such critiques replay earlier discussions of the neo‐imperial dimensions of the British documentary tradition. Important debates concerning the colonial and ­postcolonial politics of ethnographic cinema focus on the Colonial Film Unit in Africa and other colonial and postcolonial outgrowths of the documentary movement championed by Grierson during and after the war. These glocal ­extensions of the British apparatus for reality production were, according to

Figure 29.2  The documentary influence in Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

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Manthia Diawara, helpful in introducing cinematic infrastructure to underdevel‑ oped ­countries, but their work was ‘paternalistic and racist’ in significant ways (Diawara 1992, p. 4). And, indeed, one can back this critique up into the mid‐ 1930s with the making of Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934), produced by Grierson for the Empire Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board. The film has been taken to task by numerous critics not only for deploy‑ ing documentary on behalf of a frankly colonial enterprise but, as Michael Renov (2005) expresses it, for ‘helping to put a happy face on British imperialism’ (p. 42). Even a sympathetic critic such as William Guynn (1998), who reads the film as staunchly resisting sponsors’ pressure to ‘present positive images of the British Commonwealth’, acknowledges that Wright appropriates the culture of the Ceylonese and ‘subjects them to the distortions of exoticism’ (1998, pp.  97–98). This is essentially the line taken by critics of Slumdog who accuse Boyle of presenting Indian poverty as the exotic other of Western privilege, evoking a kind of neo‐imperial voyeuristic p­ leasure rather than a better under‑ standing of Indian culture.4 Slumdog Millionaire thus adheres closely enough to the tradition of British ­documentary in the Global South to attract the kind of criticism and controversy that have, not unjustifiably, dogged that tradition. But its neo‐imperialism is quite differently inflected than earlier docu‐realisms of colonial and postcolonial poverty, marked by a new, neoliberal emphasis on the enterprising individual and a frank willingness to dissolve the entire illusion of vérité for the sake of a feel‐good frolic. Just as in Trainspotting, where a head‐first dive into the ‘worst toilet in Scotland’ induces an effect of unexpected serenity and pleasure, so the young Jamal’s plunge through a hanging latrine into the pool of excrement below turns out happily, providing him with a powerful olfactory repellent which parts the crowd sur‑ rounding his idol Bachchan and enables him to secure the great man’s autograph. And, again, as in Trainspotting, any lingering reality effect of such scenes is largely overridden by Boyle’s signature style of editing and audio post‐production, an aesthetic of entertainment that owes more to the music video than to the Loachian docudrama. Thus retooled and stylised, the transnational docudramatic elements in Slumdog slide almost without friction into the narrative envelope of the glocal gameshow. Reconstructed according to the suspenseful temporality and ever‐rising stakes of the Millionaire format, Jamal’s life story becomes increasingly disconnected from the ordinary or the actual. The film, like the reality show it incorporates, shapes the particulars of lived experience as a low‐level service worker in Mumbai into an instructive drama of exceptionality. Their common lesson, blueprinted in Britain precisely for reproduction in transnational form, is to accept as inevitable all manner of contemporary hardships – the growing insecurity of employment, the erosion of social welfare provisions, the decline of community  –  while finding solace in the dream of momentary celebrity and sudden unearned wealth.



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We should have some misgivings about the enormous appeal of this lesson for  audiences around the world, and hence about the massive popularity of Slumdog Millionaire and the reality format it subsumes and extends. What we should not do is to deny the distinctly British provenance of the film’s glocal realism. Like the James Bond and Harry Potter films, Slumdog attests to the present‐ day vigour of a foundational strategy for transnational British cinema, even as it highlights the potentially pernicious aesthetic and political compromises attendant on global success.

Notes 1 Influential statements on the transnational turn in British film studies include Higson (2000) and Ezra and Rowden (2006). 2 Though not as expensive as the very biggest Hollywood productions (Warner Brothers spent $3.9 million on Gone With the Wind, equivalent to well over a hundred million in today’s dollars), the British exports often approached $1 million. According to Chapman (2005, p. 329n16), the budget for Korda’s 1936 science‐fiction film Things to Come was more than $1.3 million. 3 On the industry’s pursuit of cultural legitimacy, and the particular use of the Academy Awards to ‘redefine filmmaking as art’, see Decherney (2005, p. 8). At least one film adapted from a British play or novel was nominated for Best Picture in 22 of the awards’ first 25 years. As for more recent decades, in addition to the respect accorded Britain’s literary heritage productions at the Oscars, a further index of Britain’s continuing agency in matters of literary taste and value has been Hollywood’s embrace of projects based on novels that, while not British, have been elevated to the status of ‘contempo‑ rary classic’ via Britain’s unrivalled instrument of global Anglophone consecration, the Man Booker Prize. Studio‐financed films made from the Booker winners Schindler’s Ark by Australian Thomas Keneally, The English Patient by Sri Lankan Canadian Michael Ondaatje, and Life of Pi by Spanish‐born Canadian Yan Martel all won multiple Oscars including the award for Best Director. We look in vain for analogous cases among win‑ ners of America’s Pulitzer Prize. The only recent Pulitzer adaptation even to approach this level of recognition is The Hours (2003), which took a single Oscar for Best Actress. And The Hours is a film by a British director about a canonical British writer (Virginia Woolf ), co‐produced with the UK and partly filmed in London. 4 For a reception history of Slumdog that highlights debates over its neo‐imperialism, see Banaji (2010).

References Andrews, Hannah (2014). Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergence Since 1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bakker, Gerben (2005). The decline and fall of the European film industry: sunk costs, market size, and market structure, 1890–1927. Economic History Review 58 (2): 310–351. Banaji, Shakuntala (2010). Seduced “outsiders” versus sceptical “insiders”? Slumdog Millionaire through its (re)viewers. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 7 (1): 1–24. Avaialable at: www.participations.com (accessed 10 November 2018). Bennett, Tony (1983). The Bond phenomenon: theorising a popular hero. Southern Review 16 (2): 195–225. Betz, Mark. (2004). ‘Co‐production today.’ Film Reference. Available at: http://www. filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy‐Awards‐Crime‐Films/Co‐productions‐ CO‐PRODUCTION‐TODAY.html. (accessed 5 March 2015). BFI (2005). Back to the Future: The Fall and Rise of the British Film Industry in the 1980s, An Information Briefing. London: BFI National Library. Available at: www.bfi.org.uk/ sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi‐back‐to‐the‐future‐the‐fall‐and‐rise‐of‐the‐british‐ film‐industry‐in‐the‐1980s.pdf (accessed 10 November 2018). BFI (2013). Statistical Yearbook 2013. London: BFI Research and Statistics Unit. Available at: www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi‐statistical‐yearbook‐2013.pdf (accessed 2 March 2015). Burton, Alan and Chibnall, Steve (2013). Historical Dictionary of British Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Casanova, Pascale (2005). Literature as a world. New Left Review 31: 71–90. Chapman, James (2005). Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film. New York: Palgrave. Chibnall, Steve (2007). ‘Quota Quickies’: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI. Decherney, Peter (2005). Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press. Diawara, Manthia (1992). African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Esty, Joshua (2003). A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ezra, Elizabeth and Rowden, Terry (2006). What is transnational cinema? In: Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (ed. Elizabeth Ezra), 1–12. London: Routledge. Gehlawat, Ajay (2013). Slumdog comprador: coming to terms with the Slumdog phenomenon. In: The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology (ed. Ajay Gehlawat), 163–177. London: Anthem Press. Grierson, John (1966) (orig. 1946). Grierson on Documentary, rev. edn (ed. Forsyth Hardy). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Guynn, William (1998). The art of national projection: Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon. In: Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (ed. Barry Keith Grant), 83–98. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hall, Stuart (1996) (orig. 1988). New ethnicities. In: Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (ed. Kuan‐Hsing Chen and David Morley), 442–451. London: Routledge. Hay, James and Ouillette, Laurie (eds.) (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post‐Welfare Citizenship. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Higson, Andrew (2000). The limiting imagination of national cinema. In: Cinema and Nation (ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie), 63–74. London: Routledge. Higson, Andrew (2003). English Heritage, English Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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Higson, Andrew (2005). Fiction and the film industry. In: A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction (ed. James F. English), 58–82. Oxford: Blackwell. Higson, Andrew (2015). British cinema, Europe, and the global reach for audiences. In: European Cinema and Television: Public Policy and Everyday Life (ed. Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall and Andrew Higson), 127–150. London: Palgrave. Higson, Andrew and Maltby, Richard (1999). ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Hill, John (1986). Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI. Hill, John (1996). British television and film: the making of a relationship. In: Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone), 151–176. Luton: John Libbey/Luton University Press. Hill, John (1997). Interview with Ken Loach. In: Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (ed. George McKnight), 160–176. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hill, John (1999). British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holmes, Su (2005). British TV and Film Culture of the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You. Bristol: Intellect. Kanzler, Martin, Susan Newman‐Baudais, and André Lang. (2008). The Circulation of European Co‐productions and Entirely National Films in Europe, 2001–2007. Krakow: Council of Europe Film Policy Forum. Available at: http://www.obs.coe.int/ documents/205595/452480/Coproduction+Krakow+2008+EN.pdf/f3371c64‐ a1a1‐48b9‐a0e0‐f74ba4a936f7. (accessed 20 February 2015). Lay, Samantha (2002). British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit. London: Wallflower Press. Monk, Claire and Sargeant, Amy (eds.) (2002). British Historical Cinema. New York: Routledge. Murray, Simone (2002). Harry Potter, Inc. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5 (4). Available at: http://www.media‐culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php. (accessed 25 January 2015). Murray, Simone (2011). The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge. O’Regan, Tom (1999). Cultural exchange. In: A Companion to Film Theory (ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam), 262–295. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Shaughnessy, Martin (2011). French cinema: counter‐model, cultural exception, resistances. In: Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique (ed. Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B Vagner), 328–346. New York: Routledge. Renov, Michael (2005). Documentary disavowals, or, the digital, documentary, and postmodernity. In: Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (ed. John Fullerton and Jan Ollson), 39–53. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Richards, Jeffrey (2010) (orig. 1984). The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain. London: I.B. Tauris. Rotha, Paul (1952) (orig. 1936). Documentary Film, 3e, revised and enlarged, (in collaboration with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith). London: Faber and Faber. Rotha, Paul (1983). Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sengupta, Mitu (2013). A million dollar exit from the slum‐world: Slumdog Millionaire’s troubling formula for social justice. In: The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology (ed. Ajay Gehlawat), 69–90. London: Anthem Press.

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Street, Sarah (2002). Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. New York: Continuum. Street, Sarah (2009). British National Cinema, 2e. New York: Routledge. Sussex, Elizabeth (1975). The Rise and Fall of British Documentary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thorpe, Vanessa. (2003). ‘Life imitates art as refugee film boy finds new home in Britain,’ Observer (6 April). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/apr/06/ film.immigration. (accessed 12 December 2014). Tieber, Claus (2013). Slumdogs, coolies, and gangsters: Amitabh Bachchan and the legacy of 1970s Bollywood in Slumdog Millionaire. In: The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology (ed. Ajay Gehlawat), 109–120. London: Anthem Press. Trotter, David (2008). Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher: towards a theory of haptic narrative. Paragraph 31 (2): 138–158. Walker, Greg (2003). Korda, Englishness, and the “international film”. In: The Private Life of Henry VIII (ed. Greg Walker), 27–41. New York: I.B. Tauris. Wayne, Michael (2006). Working Title mark II: a critique of the atlanticist paradigm for British cinema. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 2 (1): 59–73.

Index

Note: Film/publication titles are in italics. Page numbers in italics refer to figures; those with ‘n’ refer to notes. 2,000 Women 465 2 × 4 (film)  395, 398 3‐D and widescreen cinema technology  306–307 12 Angry Films 121–122, 122 12 Years a Slave  337, 455, 457 30 Years On: The Arts Council and The Film Maker 120 The 39 Steps  60, 466 49th Parallel  69, 76, 79 ’71 (film)  502–503 81 (film)  118 84 Charing Cross Road 476 About Adam  415, 416, 417 Above Us the Waves 90 Abrahamson, Lenny  254, 255, 256 Absences and (Im)possibilities: Traces of an Experimental Cinema in Ireland 106, 120–121 Absolute Beginners  225, 476 Accelerator 397 accents, regional/national  203–204, 210 The Acid House 226 acting and stardom  201–215

The Actors 403n5 Adam and Paul 255, 256, 395, 397, 401, 402, 403, 403n5 adaptation and literature British Cinema  143–156 Hollywood 146–149 After ‘68  118, 120, 397 The Age of Innocence 215 The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 49, 55, 137n1 Agnew, John  269–270 Ahern, Bertie  324 Akenfield 220 Akomfrah, John  447, 453–454, 455–456 The Alamo 210 Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinema 197n15 Aldgate, Anthony  75, 137n1 Alfie 92 Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema 466 All About My Mother 401 An Alligator Named Daisy 90 All Night Long 187 All Our Yesterdays 144

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, First Edition. Edited by John Hill. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

566 Index Amarilly of Clothes‐Line Alley  540, 541 In America 255 American Cinematographer 305–306 American Idol 557 American Interior  512, 524 American International Pictures (AIP) 171 American involvement in British Cinema  286–289 Anderson, Lindsay  89, 99, 102n4, 179–186, 189, 190, 195 Andrew, Dudley  249 Andrews, Hannah  293, 338–340 Andrews, Julie  92 Angel  230, 238, 253, 254, 395 Angela’s Ashes 395 Angels and Insects 131 The Angels’ Share 463 Angry Young Men movement  358 Anita and Me 482 Anna Karenina 152, 153 Annan Report  290 Anne Devlin  117, 239, 391, 392 Another Country 131 Another Time, Another Place  135, 343 Anthony, Barry  14 Anton 395 Antoniak, Urszula  268–269 Antonioni, Michelangelo  92, 178 architecture, space, and place, British Cinema 372–383 Ardmore studios  237–238, 317–318, 319–321 Argento, Dario  172 Arlington House  381–382 Arnold, Andrea  146 Art Deco style  57 Artistic Creation  11 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 23 grants 17 Arts Council  109 30 Years On: The Arts Council and The Film Maker 120 British Arts Council  112 Asquith, Anthony  94

Assembled Memories: Jack B. Yeats, 1871–1957 110 Associated British Picture Corporation  89, 279 Associated Communication Corporation 290 Associated Talking Pictures  50 Association of Independent Producers (AIP)  121, 238 Atonement  152, 231, 551, 552 Attenborough, Richard  213, 223 Augé, Marc  417 authorship British Cinema  177–198 Cinema Authorship 195 Hollywood  177–178, 179, 180, 182, 184–185, 189 Irish Cinema  252–257 The Avengers 232n8 Aventure Malgache 185 An Awfully Big Adventure 476 Babymother 451–452, 451 Back Beat 231 Backdraft 535 Bakewell, Joan  86 Balch, Antony  189–190 Balcon, Jill  212 Balcon, Michael  52, 63, 71, 77–78, 82n2, 281, 548, 549 Balsom, Dennis  510–511 Bamford, Kenton  19 Bamforth, James  10 Bandit Queen 450 Bank Holiday 383n2 Barnes, John  13 Barnes, William  13 Barnett, Anthony  469 Barr, Charles  50, 60, 72, 73, 88, 144, 194, 342 Barry, John  224 Barry Lyndon 220 Barton, Ruth  118–119, 389 Bates, Alan  209 The Battle of Algiers 122 The Battle of Britain 221–222

Index 567 Baucus, Joseph D.  8 BBC Films  291 Beatles  85, 92, 93, 224, 231 Beckett, Samuel  121, 263–264 BECTU (Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union) 308 Belfast Exposed  123 Bell, Melanie  351 Belle  443, 455, 456 The Bells Go Down  51, 71, 74, 82n1 Bend It Like Beckham  353, 452, 482 Bennett, Charles  60, 185 Bent Out of Shape 398 Bergfelder, Tim  61–62 Bernard, James  219 Berwick Street Film Collective  109 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 353 The Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970 137n1 BFI see British Film Institute Bhaji on the Beach 452 The Big Blockade 77–78 Billy Elliot  137n2, 358, 359–361, 359, 481, 526, 551 Billy Liar 102n3 The Bioscope  40, 279 The Birth of a Nation 38 The Birth of the Beatles 231 Black, Cathal  110 Black Audio Film Collective  447, 454 Black Beauty 480 Black Film Bulletin 448 On the Black Hill 476 Black Joy  379, 446 Blackmail  302, 466 Blackout 74 The Black Pirate 303 Black Screen/Siren Spirits 450 Blair, Tony  337 Blanche Fury 305 Blandford, Steve  465–466, 478 Blithe Spirit 305 Bloody Kids 337 Bloody Sunday 463 Blossom Time  62, 63

Blow‐Up  92, 178 Blue Bloods 542 Blue Funk  120 The Blue Lamp  84, 87, 88, 95 Blunkett, David  474 Board of British Film Censors  90 Boardwalk Empire 542 Bogwoman 397 Bold Emmet, Ireland’s Martyr 37 Bond ( James Bond) films  91, 150, 170, 223–224, 306, 548, 550–551, 552, 561 Bonjour Tristesse 197n12 Bonnie and Clyde 93 Bon Voyage 185 Boogaloo and Graham 244 Booker, Christopher  85 boom and bust cycle, British Cinema  278–279 Boorman, John  135, 238 Border Country 138n8 Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe 249 The Borderlands  171, 172 The Borgias 254 Born into Brothels  559 Born to Boogie 225 Boston Kickout 226 Bottoms Up 95 Boulting brothers  86 Bowen, Elizabeth  43 Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema 543 Box, Sydney  194 The Boxer  230, 255, 394 Boy Eats Girl 251 The Boy from Mercury  389, 395 Boys Beware: Homosexuals Are on the Prowl 362 Boy Soldier / Milwr Bychan  516, 517 Boy’s Own Paper 71–72 Boys Town 536 Bradley, David  101 Bragg, Billy  474 Branagh, Kenneth  201 Brandes, Werner  61 Brando, Marlon  215

568 Index Branigan, Edward  299, 309 Brassed Off  137n2, 358, 359, 429, 482 Braveheart  232n10, 241, 324 Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema 491 Bread and Roses 556 Breakfast on Pluto  230, 254 Breaking Bad 341 The Break‐Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo‐Nationalism 495 Brenton, Guy  102n4 Brick Lane  373, 382 Bride and Prejudice  150, 481 Brideshead Revisited  131, 220, 364, 480 Bridge, Joan  309 The Bridge on the River Kwai  91, 189, 221, 231 Brief Encounter  69, 75, 94, 151, 154, 196n6, 205, 209, 351–355, 352, 361, 366 Brigadoon 491 Brighton Rock 383n2 ‘Brighton School’  10, 11, 14 Bright Star  149, 152 Britain at Bay 374 Britain Can Take It! 71 Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War 137n1 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA)  9 British Acoustic  301 British Arts Council  112 British Cinema see also film music; Irish Cinema 1930s 49–64 1950s and 1960s  84–103 1980s and 1990s  127–138 agency and effect 128 American involvement  286–289 authorship 177–198 black British Cinema, the fragmentation of the ‘black’ in  449–453 black British film in post‐multiculturalist times 453–457 black film ‐ critical race film studies  446–449

Bloomsbury influence  132–133 boom and bust cycle  278–279 British authors and auteurs  193–196 British film genres  158–174 British film studies and class  427–428 Britishness of British film genres  161–168 British New Wave  208–211 a certain tendency of the English Cinema 475–477 challenges to the national frame  286–289 changing relations with television  289–293 citizenship 133–134 class as identity and relationship  426–427 the contemporary problem of the proletariat 428–431 critical race film studies – black film, British Cinema  446–449 ‘cross‐over’ acting  212–214 cultural change  84–103 cultural clashes/influences  58–64 culturally English film‐making in the global marketplace  479–481 ‘the diversity of it, the chaos!’  471–475 Ealing Studios  71–72, 77–78, 88–89 Englishness‐for‐export 481–483 The Englishness of British Cinema  463–486 ethnicity and race  443–458 European Union involvement  288–289 the exhaustion of Marxist hermeneutics? 438–441 finance/funding  42–43, 93, 98, 235–236, 281–289 formation of the canon  70–72 the fragmentation of the ‘black’ in black British Cinema  449–453 gender and sexuality  349–367 genericity of British film genres  168–173 Glasgow Film Fund  289 ‘Golden Age’  67–70 heritage films  127–138, 145

Index 569 histories of reception and audiences  78–81 history, heritage and the national past  127–138, 145 Hollywood dominance  545–547 ideological critique of British wartime cinema 72–75 industry and policy  277–294 key trends of the 1950s and 1960s  88–93 literature and adaptation  143–156 Ministry of Information (MOI)  70, 75–78 National Lottery  282, 289 ‘New Wave’ of British film realism  90–91, 97, 208–211 pioneering scholarship on the British film industry  279 post‐1960s feminism  133 the proletariat  423–441 the question of national cinema 477–479 race and ethnicity  443–458 a reactionary and self‐pitying mythology  470–471 realism and the British New Wave  90–91, 97, 208–211 reflection/reception 128 Regional Screen Agencies (RSAs)  285, 289 the return of the ‘English Question’  466–470 revisionist histories  75–78 school settings  94–103 science fiction and the problem of the proletariat 431–438 Second World War  67–82 silent cinema  7–23 Slumdog Millionaire as Glocal Realist Cinema 553–561 space, place, and architecture  372–383 technology 298–311 television 332–344 Thatcherite privatisation  281–282, 284 traditional film histories  70–72 transatlantic cinema as British Cinema  547–553

as transnational cinema  545–547 transnational strategies  545–561 British Cinema History 280 British Cinema in the 1980s 137n3 British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ 86 British Cinema Now 280 British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration 86 British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference 86 British Crime Cinema 165 British Film Academy  9 The British Film Catalogue  161, 162, 164 British Film Institute (BFI)  9, 80, 143, 284, 454–455, 457 Black Film Bulletin 448 Diversity Standards  455 British Film Institute Summer School  72 ‘British Film Makers’ (monographs)  194–195 British Film Music 232n13 British Genres: Cinema and Society: 1930–1960  161, 162, 163, 164, 165–166 British International Pictures  288 British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate Ltd. 14 British National Cinema 166 British New Wave  208–211 ‘The British School of Technicolor’  305 British Women’s Cinema 165 Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU) 308 Broccoli, Cubby  91 Brooks, Richard  189, 190 Brotherhood 542 Brothers in Trouble 450 Brown, Richard  14 The Browning Version  94, 97 In Bruges  237, 395, 397, 552 Bullet Boy  453, 482 Burch, Noël  11, 14 Burke, Andrew  381 Burke, Stephen  118, 120 The Butcher Boy  250, 254, 389, 395 Butterfield 8 211

570 Index Butterfly Kiss 486 Bygraves, Max  97 Byzantium 254 Cabaret 103n5 Caerdydd 519 Cagney, James  535–536 Cahiers du Cinéma  108, 159, 179, 187 Cal  239–240, 395 Calendar Girls 354 Calvary  234, 235, 237, 265–267, 266 Calvert, Phyllis  205–208, 206, 215 Camelot 327 Cameron, Ian  177, 186, 187, 188–189, 190, 191, 197n7, 197n8, 198n16 The Canal 252 Cannes Film Festival  336–337 A Canterbury Tale  69, 375, 484, 484 Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire  107, 109, 112, 115, 116, 390 Under Capricorn 185 Captive 232n12 The Captive Heart 465 Caravaggio 363, 364 Cardiff, Jack  304, 305, 308, 309 Carné, Marcel  179 Carney, John  260–262 Carreras, James  281 Carrington 477 Carrington 131 Carry on Cleo 93 Carry On Constable 89 Carry On genre  350, 357 Carry On Girls 383n2 Carry On Nurse 89 Carry On Sergeant 96 Carry On Teacher 96–97 Carry On Up the Khyber 93 Carter, Maurice  305 Cary, Tristram  219 Casablanca 79 The Casey Millions 388 Castle of the Living Dead  192, 194 Catherine the Great 63 Cathy Come Home  342, 555 Caughie, John  292, 342

Cavalcanti, Alberto  71 ‘Celticism’, film music  226–228 Celtic Tiger era, Irish Cinema  119, 123, 416 Cencrastus 491 censorship Board of British Film Censors  90 Irish Cinema  33–34, 38, 45 Irish Film Censorship 314 Censorship of Films Act (1923)  33 Chadha, Gurinder  150 Chaero 403n6 Challis, Chris  305 Chanan, Michael  13–14, 284 Chance of a Lifetime 186 Channel 4 Television  212, 281, 284, 289, 291–293, 333–339, 343, 450 Chaplin 476 Chapman, James  55, 75, 158 The Charge of the Light Brigade 93 Chariots of Fire  131, 231, 476 Charley Moon 223 Charlie Bubbles 190 Charter for the Arts in Scotland 496 Cherry Falls 252 Cherry Tree Lane 485 Chestnuts in Her Lap 49 Chibnall, Steve  306–307 Chicago Joe and the Showgirl  135, 476 Chicken 402 The Children 171 The Children of Lir 227 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 223 Christie, Ian  193–194, 197n14 Christie, Julie  92 Christine Geraghty  86 Chu Chin Chow 63 Churchill, Winston  76–77 Cineaste 118 Cinema Action  117 Cinema and Ireland  117, 247, 314, 315, 320, 322, 409, 411, 533, 538 Cinema and Landscape 408 ‘Cinema and Society’ (series of books)  137n1, 194 Cinema and State 280

Index 571 Cinema and the City 408 Cinema Authorship 195 CinemaScope 300 The Cinematic City 408 Cinematograph Act (1909)  8–9, 33 Cinematograph Act (1927)  19, 20 Cinematograph Exhibitors Association  78 Cinematograph Films Act  59 Cinematograph Films Council  290 Cinétheque 108 Cinquegrani, Maurizio  15 Circus of Horrors 162 Citadel 485 Claim of Right for Scotland 503 Clair, René  179 Clark, Colin  202 Clayton, Jack  209 Cloch 120 Coal Face 53 Coalface 356 C Oblique O 120 Cocteau, Jean  179 Coherence 424 Cole, George  95 Collado, Esperanza  120 The Colleen Bawn 36 Colley, George  318–319 Collins, Michael  37, 46n2 Colonial Film project  23 colour technology  303–306 Columbia 98 Comedown 485 Comerford, Joe  106, 109, 111, 115–116, 118, 121, 239 Comfort, Lance  195 Coming up Roses (Rhosyn a Rhith) 517–518 The Commitments  228–229, 250 The Committee 225 The Common Touch 69 Community 485 The Company of Wolves 254 Confessions of a Window Cleaner 343 Connery, Sean  91 The Constant Nymph  20, 374 Control 482 Convoy  71, 79

Cook, Pam  62 Cornelius, Henry  89 Cornell, Daniell  263 Corrigan, Timothy  146 cosmopolitanism, gender and sexuality: Irish Cinema  391–393 Cotton Queen 383n2 The Count of Monte Cristo 326 Country 395 The Country and the City 138n8 The Courier  249, 413 The Courier and Joyriders 110 Coward, Noël  71, 73, 196n6, 205 Cowboys and Angels  399, 400, 418 Crabtree, Arthur  207 The Crane Bag 390 CRC (Cultural Relations Committee)  315 ‘Creative Europe’, finance/funding  552 ‘Creativity at Ealing Studios and Hammer Films’ 281 The Criminal  191, 486 Criminal Conversation 390 Critical History of British Cinema 52 ‘cross‐over’ acting  212–214 Crown Film Unit  69 Crucial Tales 450 The Cruel Sea  88 Cruiskeen Lawn 388 Crush Proof  397, 413 The Crying Game  254, 337, 391–392 cultural change, British Cinema  84–103 cultural clashes/influences British Cinema  58–64 Irish Cinema  29–33, 38–41 Cultural Relations Committee (CRC)  315 Cultural Value and Inequality 455 Culture Club – A Kiss Across the Ocean 225 The Cumberland Story 180 Curran, Joseph M.  534, 535–536 The Curse of Frankenstein 91 Curtis, Richard  194 Curtis, Simon  201 Curtiz, Michael  207 Cutts, Graham  60–61 Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society)  515

572 Index Daily Film Renter 68 Daily Mail 333–334 The Dam Busters  89, 96 The Damned  97, 189 Dance Craze 225 Dance with a Stranger  130, 476 Dancing with the Stars 557 Dangerous Moonlight 70 Danny Boy 358 Darby O’Gill and the Little People 228 A Daring Daylight Burglary 10 Dark Knight 548 Darling  91, 92 Dave, Paul  478 David Copperfield 147 Davies, Andrew  154 Davies, Norman  464 Davies, Terence  130 The Dawn  43, 45, 46, 388 Day‐Lewis, Cecil  212 Day‐Lewis, Daniel  212–214, 213, 215, 255 Dead Bodies  251, 403n5 The Deadly Affair 91 Dead Man’s Shoes 131 Dead Meat 251 Dead of Night  69, 72, 182 Dead Ringers 474 The Deal 337 Dearden, Basil  187 Dearden and Relph  86 Dear White People 456 Death Line 172 December Bride 391 Deep Breath 341 Defoe, Daniel  473 De Forest Phonofilms/British Talking Pictures 301 Deleuze, Gilles  263 The Demi‐Paradise  82n1, 465 de Niro, Robert  215 Denning, Michael  429–430 The Departed 542 Department of Culture, Media and Sport 282 Der Himmel uber Berlin (Wings of Desire) 445

Derry Film & Video Workshop  120 Desert Victory 69 Desmond, Aoife  120 To the Devil a Daughter 172 The Devil Never Sleeps 189 The Devil’s Own 232n10 Dick, Vivienne  106, 108, 112, 113–114, 116, 120, 121 Dick Barton Strikes Back 383n2 Dickinson, Margaret  285 Dickinson, Thorold  181, 182, 183 Die, Die, My Darling 162 digital technologies  309–311 Digital Screen Network Scheme  293–294 digital technology influence  293–294 The Dilapidated Dwelling 486 Dirty Pretty Things 480 The Disappeared 171 Disc Mirror 90 Diski, Jenny  102n1 Disney, Walt  180 Distant Voices, Still Lives  130, 134, 476, 477 Divorcing Jack 396 Django Unchained 457 Doctor in the House 89 Doctor Who 341 Documentary News Letter  80, 81 Doghouse  171, 172 Dog Soldiers 171 The Dominant Race 533 Donner, Clive  189, 190, 192 Doss House 51 The Double 455 Down the Corner  109, 111, 120 Downton Abbey  138n4, 222 Dracula  91, 306, 548 The Draughtsman’s Contract 220 Dream Kitchen 398 In Dreams 254 Dreams of England 483 The Dressmaker 476 drive‐in cinema  121–122 Dr No  91, 306 Drowning by Numbers 220 The Drum  54, 232n11

Index 573 Dr. Who 519 Dublin Docklands Development Authority  121–122 Dufaycolor 304 Dupont, E.A.  61 Durgnat, Raymond  86–87, 89, 187, 192, 194 Dwoskin, Stephen  110 Dyer, Richard  94, 351, 365 Eady levy  282, 283, 287 Eagleton, Terry  414 Ealing Studios  71–72, 77–78, 88–89 Ealing Studios 198n16 Eamon 395 Earl Cameron  354 The Early Bird 242 East Is East  145, 452 Easy Virtue 466 Eden 403 Eden Lake  171, 485 On the Edge 395 The Edge of Love 524 Edward II  138n9, 477 effeminophobia 355–361 Electric Moon 450 Elephant Boy 232n11 Ella Enchanted 326 Ellis, John  51, 69, 283, 351 Elvey, Maurice  60–61, 302 Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema 542 EMI  278, 279 Emma 137n4 Emmet, Robert  37 Empire 54 Enchanted 131 Encyclopaedia of British Film 163 Enduring Love 153 England, England 470 England, Our England 470 The English Constitution 464 English Gothic 466 English Heritage, English Cinema 137n3, 471–477, 483 English Hitchcock 466

An English Journey 486 The English Patient 561n3 Enigma 476 The Entertainer 97 Eon Productions  550–551 Ericsson, Peter  179 Esmonde, John  102 ethnicity and race, British Cinema  443–458 Eureka Stockade 232n11 European Union involvement, British Cinema 288–289 Evening Standard 335 Evergreen  57, 59, 74, 170 An Everlasting Piece 396 Eve’s Film Review 22 Evita 222 Excalibur 319 Exhibitors Herald‐World 534 Ex Machina 424 Experimental Film Club  106, 120 Exposure  390, 394 F (film)  171 The Fall  243, 264 The Fallen Idol 182 The Family Way 224 Fanatic 162 Fanny by Gaslight  69, 78–79 Far and Away 535 Far From the Madding Crowd 92 Farley, Fidelma  389 Fassbender, Michael  256 The Fate of the Language (Tynged yr Laith) 515 Federation of Irish Film Societies  109 Fellow Traveller 476 Feuchwanger, Lion  63 Fiddlers Three 72 FIDO (Film Industry Defence Organisation) 290 The Field  227, 255, 389 A Field in England 338–343 Fields, Gracie  49, 55–56, 56, 222–223 Fifty Key British Films 143 Film  121, 264

574 Index Film4Today 338 Film as Film 197n13 Film Board  240 Film Company of Ireland (FCOI)  38, 39, 40, 42, 43 Film Directions: A Film Magazine for Ireland 109 Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s  465, 478–479, 481, 483 Film Europe movement  61, 288 Film Four International  291 FilmFour Ltd  278, 292–293 Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) 290 Film Institute of Ireland  120 Film Ireland 400 film music  217–232 Absolute Beginners 225 The Acid House 226 Akenfield 220 Angel 230 Atonement 231 The Avengers 232n8 Back Beat 231 Barry, John  224 Barry Lyndon 220 The Battle of Britain 221–222 Beatles  224, 231 The Birth of the Beatles 231 Bond ( James Bond) films  223–224 Born to Boogie 225 Boston Kickout 226 The Boxer 230 Braveheart 232n10 Breakfast on Pluto 230 Brideshead Revisited 220 The Bridge on the River Kwai  221, 231 British Film Music 232n13 British film music and the ‘classical’ tradition 218–222 British music films and pop music  222–226 Captive 232n12 ‘Celticism’ 226–228 Chariots of Fire 231

Charley Moon 223 The Children of Lir 227 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 223 The Commitments 228–229 The Committee 225 Culture Club – A Kiss Across the Ocean 225 Dance Craze 225 Darby O’Gill and the Little People 228 The Devil’s Own 232n10 The Draughtsman’s Contract 220 Drowning by Numbers 220 The Drum 232n11 Elephant Boy 232n11 ‘English pastoral’ music  219–220 Eureka Stockade 232n11 Evita 222 The Family Way 224 The Field 227 Fields, Gracie  222–223 The Film Music of Arthur Bliss 232n13 The Film Music of Richard Rodney Bennett 232n13 The Film Music of William Alwyn 232n13 finance/funding 224 Formby, George  222–223 Friday, Gavin  229 The Full Monty  225, 226, 231 The Gentle Gunman  227, 232n11 The Go Between 220 Greenwood, John  227 Hammer’s Gothic horrors  219 A Hard Day’s Night 224 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush  224–225 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 224 In His Life: The John Lennon Story 231 Hours and the Times 231 House of America 226 Hungry Hill  227, 232n11 Imagine 225 The Informer 228 Irish Rhapsodies 227 The Isle of Innisfree 228 James Bond series of films  223–224 Jarre, Maurice  228

Index 575 John and Yoko: A Love Story 231 John Lennon: A Journey in the Life 231 The Killing of John Lennon 231 Lamb 229 The Last Days of Dolwyn 232n11 Last of the High Kings 230 Lawrence of Arabia 231 Lennon Naked 231 Les Misérables 222 The Lion in Winter 231 Little Voice 222–223 Lloyd Webber, Andrew  222 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 226 Lord of the Dance 230 Mad Dogs and Englishmen 225 Mamma Mia!  222–223, 225 Man of Aran 227–228 Mathieson, Muir  220 Melody 225 Michael Collins 227 Midnight Express 231 Mise Eire 228, 229 musicals 222–226 musical traditions and Ireland  226–230 My Left Foot 227 In the Name of the Father 229 ‘national culture’ component  218–222 Nowhere Boy 231 Odd Man Out  227, 228 Oh! What a Lovely War 223 Oliver! 223 Once 229 Ó’Riada, Séan  228, 229 A Passage to India 231 Performance 225 The Phantom of the Opera 222 Pimpernel Smith 232n11 Pink Floyd: The Wall 223 Playboy of the Western World 228 Plunkett and Maclaine 220 pop music  222–226 publications 217 Quartet 232n11 The Quiet Man  227, 228, 230 Rakes of Mallow 228

The Red Shoes 231 Reggae 225 Riverdance 230 Rose of Tralee 228 Rubber Soul 231 Ryan’s Daughter  227, 228 San Demetrio, London 232n11 Scott of the Antarctic 221 The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball 225 Shakespeare in Love 231 Sinfonia Antarctica 221 Slumdog Millionaire 231 Smashing Time 223 Sunshine on Leith 225, 226 S.W.A.L.K. 225 The Tales of Beatrix Potter 223 That’ll Be the Day 225 This is the Sea 230 This Other Eden 227 Titanic 232n10 Tom Jones 231 Tommy 223 Trainspotting  225, 226, 232n9 Traveller 227 Two of Us 231 Up the Junction 225 Van Morrison  229 Vaughan Williams, Ralph  220 Waking Ned Devine 230 Walton, William  220–221 Wonderwall 225 You Made Me the Thief of My Heart 229 Young, Victor  228 The Film Music of Arthur Bliss 232n13 The Film Music of Richard Rodney Bennett 232n13 The Film Music of William Alwyn 232n13 Film on Four  333–338, 343 ‘Films, Directors and Critics’ (article)  188–189 Films Act (1927)  282 Films and British National Identity 137n1 Film Society  60 The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema  12, 49

576 Index finance/funding American involvement  286–289 British Cinema  42–43, 93, 98, 235–236, 281–289 ‘Creative Europe’  552 film music  224 industry and policy  281–286 Irish Cinema  42–43, 235–236, 238, 240–242, 243, 318–329 National Lottery  282, 289 Scottish Film Production Fund  498 Section 481 (tax incentive), Irish Cinema  240, 241, 326, 327, 392 ‘trickle‐down’ funding  240–242 Finney, Albert  91, 190, 209 Fire Station Artists’ Studios  121–122 Fires Were Started  70, 71 The First Gentleman 186 The First of the Few  69, 70, 79, 82n1, 465 First Wave (Irish Cinema)  106–124 see also New Wave figures: tourists, migrants and actors  112–117 film culture, curating  120–121 legacies 121–124 Fish Tank  373, 377, 382 Five Minutes of Heaven 396 Flaherty, Robert  179 Flame in the Streets 443 Flames of Passion 353 Flanagan 110 Flick 397 The Fool 476 Forbidden 383n2 The Force Awakens 242 Ford, John  45, 179, 533, 537–539 Forde, Walter  60–61 Foreman, Donal  120 The Foreman Went to France  69, 71, 82n1 Formby, George  50, 62, 72, 204, 222–223 Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity 401 Forty Below 120 Four Weddings and a Funeral 337 Fox, James  85 Frank  256, 329, 397

Frankenheimer, John  211 Frankenstein 548 Franklin, Pamela  100 Frears, Stephen  9, 99, 212, 214–215, 336, 337 Freeze Frame 403n5 Fregonese, Hugo  189 The French Connection 535 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 143 Fricker, Brenda  255 Friday, Gavin  229 Friese‐Greene, Claude  303 Friese‐Greene, William  7, 8, 307 Friese‐Greene, William  303 Fukunaga, Cary  145 The Full Monty  137n2, 225, 226, 231, 358, 359, 425, 480, 481, 558, 559 funding see finance/funding Funky Black Shorts 450 Future of the British Film Industry 283 Gable, Clark  204 Gadael Lenin (Leaving Lenin)  516, 517 Gainsborough melodramas  78–79, 148–149, 205–208, 304 Gallivant 486 Game of Thrones  243, 244, 245–246 Gandhi  131, 213 Garage  255–256, 397, 401–402, 403, 420 Garnett, Tony  101 Gaslight 52 Gaumont British Picture Corporation  279 Gauntier, Gene  35 gays 361–366 Geeson, Judy  98 gender and sexuality: British Cinema  349–367 Angry Young Men movement  358 British Cinema  349–367 Carry On genre  357 effeminophobia 355–361 gays 361–366 ‘girl power’  353 lad culture  358 ‘ladette’ culture  353 masculinity 355–361

Index 577 New Masculinity  358–359 postfeminism  352–354, 366 queers 361–366 strategies of containment  366–367 Wolfenden Report  361–362 gender and sexuality: Irish Cinema  386–403 cosmopolitanism 391–393 early years  386–389 Irish Film Board (IFB)  387, 391–393 lad culture  393, 395 men and masculinity  393–398 perceptions of cinema  386–387 postfeminism 391–393 sex and sexuality  398–400 the trouble with sex  400–402 women 389–391 Genevieve 89 Genre and Cinema 247 The Gentle Gunman  227, 232n11 The Gentle Sex  69, 74 George, Terry  245 Georgy Girl 92 Geraghty, Christine  72 Get Carter 150 Gibbons, Luke  250, 390, 391 Gibbs, John  179 Gifford, Denis  161–162 Gilliat, Sidney  95, 180 Ging, Debbie  119, 393 ‘girl power’  353 Girl with a Pearl Earring 150 Givanni, June  448 Glancy, Mark  55, 62, 81 Glasgow Film Fund  289 Gledhill, Christine  21–22, 43, 72, 74, 203, 250 Glenville, Peter  97–98 The Go Between 220 Goebbels, Joseph  63 Going My Way  534, 536, 542 Goldcrest 278 Goldfish Memory  399, 400, 415, 415, 416, 417, 418 Gone Baby Gone 542 Gone with the Wind  79, 204, 561n2

Goodbye, Mr Chips 101–102 The Good Companions 383n2 Goodhart, David  464 Goodnight Vienna 62 Good Vibrations 244, 244 The Gorbals Story 499 Gosford Park 138n4 Gothic horrors see Hammer’s Gothic horrors Gothic tradition, Irish  251, 251, 252 Got Talent 557 Grabbers 251, 251 Grade, Lew  290 Granada Television  131, 290, 327, 337 Granger, Stewart  205 Granta 191 Grau, Jorge  172 Gravity  298, 310 The Great Dictator 80 Great Expectations 144 The Great Train Robbery (1903)  10, 36 Green, O.O.  192 Greene, Graham  61, 182 Greene, Naomi  268 Greenmantle 466 Greenwood, John  227 Grenfell, Joyce  95 Greyfriars 95 Grierson, John  50, 53 Griffith, Richard  49, 50, 52 Grune, Karl  61 The Guard  235, 271n10, 329, 395, 401, 402 Guérrillère Talks 121 Gunning, Tom  12 The Guns of Navarone 189 Guru in Seven  450, 451 Gypo 379 Haggar, William  10 Half of a Yellow Sun 455 Hall, Stuart  449 The Hallow 252 The Halo Effect 397 Hamer, Robert  183–184, 189 Hammer’s Gothic horrors  91, 170–173, 208, 219

578 Index Hammer’s psychological thrillers  162 Hammond, Michael  18 A Handful of Dust 131 The Happiest Days of Your Life  95, 96 A Hard Day’s Night  92, 93, 224 The Hard Stop 457 Hardy, Forsyth  52 The Hardy Bucks Movie 402 Harkin, Margo  120 Harper, Sue  55, 63, 75, 79–80, 86, 350 Harrison, George  93 Harrower, Natalie  416 Harry Brown 485 Harry Potter adaptations  148, 170 Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows 310 Harry Potter and the Half‐Blood Prince 548 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 548 Harry Potter films  561 Harry Potter franchise  294 Harry’s Game 264 Harvey, Laurence  208–211, 211, 215 Harvey, Sylvia  108, 285 Hay, Will  72 Heartless  171, 485 Heat and Dust 131 Heavenly Pursuits 501 Hedd Wyn  516, 517 From Hell 374 Hell Is for Heroes 189 Help! 93 Henriques, Julian  451 Henry V  68, 220–221, 316 Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (‘Old Land of My Fathers’) 523–524 Hepworth, Cecil  10, 301 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush 92, 102n3, 224–225 Heritage Film Audiences 137n3 heritage films, British Cinema  127–138, 145 A Heritage of Horror  162, 171 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 224 Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen 534 Hickey, James  235 Higgins, Michael D.  322–325, 330n8, 412

High Spirits  251, 254 A High Wind in Jamaica 190 Higson, Andrew  16, 49, 72, 74, 130, 170, 465, 475, 476, 478–481, 482, 483 Hiley, Nicholas  17–18 Hill, John  87, 163–164, 248–249, 281, 285–286, 357, 376, 477, 538 Hindle Wakes  378, 383n2 Hines, Barry  101 ‘hip hedonism’ and the politics of place, Irish Cinema  415–419 In His Life: The John Lennon Story 231 Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 75 history, heritage and the national past, British Cinema  127–138, 145 The History of England 464 The History of Mr. Polly 186 History of the British Film, Low, Rachael  9, 13, 15–17, 19 History of the British Film, 1906–1914 375 Hitchcock, Alfred  19, 60–62, 144, 177, 184–185, 189, 194, 466 Hitchcock’s British Films 466 Hobson’s Choice 143 Hodges, Mike  150 Holiday Camp 383n2 Holidays with Pay 383n2 Hollywood authorship  177–178, 179, 180, 182, 184–185, 189 dominance, British Cinema  545–547 literature and adaptation  146–149 technology  300, 302, 304–305, 306, 308, 310 Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties 465 Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties  86, 91 Hollywood Irish. John Ford, Abbey Actors and the Irish Revival in Hollywood 542 Holt, Seth  189, 190 Holy Water (Hard Times) 237 Homicide: Life on the Street 542 The Hoodlum 540–541 Hope and Glory  135, 476

Index 579 Hopkins, Anthony  215 horror genre  91, 162, 170–173 Horrors of the Black Museum 162 Horse 395 The Hours 561n3 Hours and the Times 231 House of America  226, 521–523 Housing Problems  54, 554 Houston, Penelope  179 How About You 402 Howard, Leslie  204 Howard, Trevor  205 Howards End  131, 168, 375, 476 How Gay Are You? 400 How Green Was My Valley  517, 523 How Molly Malone Made Good 534 How the Irish Became White 539–541 Human Traffic  516, 521–523 Humphreys, Grainne  120 Hunger 552 Hungry Hill  227, 232n11 Hunky Dory 524 Hunter, I.Q.  169 Hunter, Jefferson  151–153, 155 Hurd, Geoff   72 Hurst, Brian Desmond  45 Hush‐a‐Bye‐Baby  120, 391, 397 Huston, John  318 Hutchings, Peter  195 Hysteria 162 I Am Legend 172 Ian Dury and the Blockheads  474 Idols 557 If…. 99–101, 100, 190 I Know Where I’m Going 69 Imagine 225 I Malavoglia 267–268 ‘Independent Artists’  180 Independent Pictures  95 Independent Production Unit (IPU)  241 Industrial Credit Corporation  318 industry and policy British Cinema  277–294 finance/funding 281–286 Irish Cinema  281–286, 313–330

The Informer  45, 228, 537 The Informers 486 The Innocent 476 Intermission  395, 397, 407–408 International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) 11 Interview with the Vampire 254 Intimate Relations 130 ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (essay)  172 Invest Northern Ireland (Invest NI)  243 Ireland, a Nation 37–38 Ireland: Behind the Wire 109 For Ireland’s Sake 35 Ireland’s Theatre on Film 317 The Irish‐ American in Popular Culture 532 Irish Cinema see also British Cinema; film music 1890s to 1930s  29–46 1910–1914, foreign filmmaking  34–37 1916–1920 37–40 anti‐sectarianism as political reconciliation and unity  40–43 authorship 252–257 Celtic Tiger era  119, 123, 416 censorship  33–34, 38, 45 Censorship of Films Act (1923)  33 critical film practice: cultural and political contexts  108–110 cultural clashes/influences  29–33, 38–41 diaspora influence  34–35 drive‐in cinema  121–122 enter the urban  413–415 film in Ireland: the national in the global? 245–246 finance/funding  42–43, 235–236, 238, 240–242, 243, 318–329 First Wave  106–124 First Wave figures: tourists, migrants and actors  112–117 First Wave film culture, curating  120–121 First Wave legacies  121–124 gender and sexuality  386–403 ‘hip hedonism’ and the politics of place 415–419

580 Index Irish Cinema (cont’d) histories and archaeologies  117–119 histories and legacies of the 1970s and the 1980s  106–124 indigenous Irish cinema, arrival  106–108 industry and policy  281–286, 313–330 an inherited tradition  409–411 international screen culture  234–257 Ireland and accented cinema  257 makeshift exhibition and international circulation 110–112 modernist tradition  237–240 the new cosmopolitans?  419–421 Northern Ireland as Westeros 242–245 postcolonial theory  412 revolution, remembering the  43–46 Section 481 (tax incentive)  240, 241, 326, 327, 392 space and place  407–421 the space of national cinema  411–412 state support  313–314 transnational cinema and genre  246–252 ‘trickle‐down’ funding  240–242 Irish Destiny  43, 44–45, 44, 388 Irish Events newsreel  39 Irish Film Board (IFB)  111, 112, 117–118, 120, 235, 236, 238, 241–242, 329 gender and sexuality: Irish Cinema  391–393 Irish Film Censorship 314 Irish Film Centre  120 Irish Film Finance Corporation  318 Irish Film Institute (IFI)  106–108, 120 Irish Film Society  46 Irish Film Theatre  109 Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema  118, 411 Irish Gothic tradition  251, 251, 252 Irish Limelight 39 Irish Masculinity on Screen 394 ‘The Irish Migrant and Film’ (essay)  535 An Irish Mother 44–45 Irish National Cinema  322, 411, 532 Irish Press 45 Irish Rhapsodies 227

Iron Britannia 469 The Isle of Innisfree 228 Isolation 251 Is That All There Is? 196n5 Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese 536 It Always Rains on Sunday 151 It’s Great to Be Young!  95–96, 102n3 It’s Love Again 57 Ivanhoe 91 Ivory, James  212, 215 Jack’s Return Home 150 Jagger, Mick  84, 85 Jamaica Inn 466 James Bond series of films  91, 150, 170, 223–224, 306, 548, 550–551, 552, 561 Jane Austen adaptations  137n4, 147 Jane Eyre 145–146 Jarman, Derek  138n9, 362–364, 364, 483 Jarre, Maurice  228 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce 1080, Bruxelles 109 Jeffers, Jennifer  148 Jennings, Humphrey  179–180 Jennings series  95 The Jewel in the Crown 131 Jew Suss  50, 55, 57, 63 Jezebel 445 J. K. Rowling  551 Joanna 92 Joe 535 John and Yoko: A Love Story 231 John Lennon: A Journey in the Life 231 Johnny Frenchman 69 Johnson, Boris  468 Johnson, Celia  205, 352 Johnson, Nunnally  182 Johnston, Denis  46 Jones, Jesse  121–123 Jordan, Neil  253, 254–255 Journal of British Cinema and Television 194 Journal of British Popular Cinema 281 Journey Together 69 Joyce, James  43 Ulysses 32 Jude 476

Index 581 Jude the Obscure 146 Jud Süß 63 Junge, Alfred  61, 63 Kalem films  34–36 Kalmus, Natalie  309 Kandukondain Kandukondain, Sense and Sensibility 150 Keep Your Seats Please 62 Kelly, Eamon  113 Kelly, Terence  93 Kember, Joe  14 Kerrigan, Justin  523 Kes 101 Khartoum 93 Kidnapped 149 Kidulthood 453 Kiefer, Warren  194 The Killing of John Lennon 231 Kind Hearts and Coronets 183–184 A Kind of Loving  90, 187–188, 357, 376, 377, 378 Kinematograph Weekly  68, 79 Kinetograph/Kinetoscope 8 Kine Weekly 279 King & Country 189 King Arthur  241, 326 The Kinkisha 390 Kipps 69 Kisses  395, 420 Kitchen 327 Klinger, Michael  194 The Knack  92, 152 Knocknagow  39–40, 41, 46n3, 388, 389 Koch, Howard  182–183 Koppel, Gideon  524, 527–528 Korda, Alexander  50, 57, 61, 278, 548–550 Korda, Zoltan  54 Korea  389, 395 Koszarski, Richard  299 Krampf, Gunther  61, 63 Krapp’s Last Tape 271n7 The Krays 130 Kubrick, Stanley  190 Kumar, Krishan  470 Kureishi, Hanif   212, 214 Kwietniewski, Richard  365

La Bern, Arthur  151 L.A. Confidential 542 lad culture gender and sexuality: British Cinema 358 Irish Cinema  393, 395 ‘ladette’ culture  353 Ladette to Lady 353 The Lad from Old Ireland  35, 46n1 Ladies in Lavender 353 Ladybird, Ladybird 342 Lady Chatterley trial  90 The Ladykillers 305 The Lady Vanishes 60 Lady Windermere’s Fan 17 Lamb  229, 389 Lambert, Alan  120 Lambert, Gavin  179, 180, 181–182, 184 The Lamp Still Burns 69 Land Girls 476 Landy, Marcia  161, 162, 165–166 Lane, Anthony  266 Langan, Clare  120 Lant, Antonia  350 Larbey, Bob  102 Larraz, Jose  172 The Last Bus Home 398 Last Days in Dublin 397 The Last Days of Dolwyn 232n11 Last of the High Kings 230 Last Orders  379, 480 Last Resort 372–383, 380 Margate as carnivalesque space  378–380 the semiotics of brutalist architecture  380–382 La Terra Trema 267 Launder, Frank  95, 180 The Lavender Hill Mob 88 Lawrence of Arabia  92, 191, 231, 306, 307 Laws of Attraction 236 Lean, David  143, 144, 180, 182, 189, 205 Leap Year 236–237 The Leavetaking 395 Leaving Lenin (Gadael Lenin)  516, 517 Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires 172 Leggott, James  146 legislation, Cinematograph Act (1909)  8–9

582 Index Lehner, Stefanie  395–396 Leigh, Vivien  202, 204 Lejeune, C.A.  49, 50–51, 62–64, 69 Lemass, Sean  316–317 Le Mépris 401 Lenczewski, Ryszard  380–381 Lennon, Peter  108–109, 119, 122 Lennon Naked 231 Les Guérrillères 121 Les Misérables 222 Lester, Richard  92 Let George Do It! 80 Let Him Have It  130, 482 Let It Be 93 Liam 337 Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture 197n15 Licking Hitler 334 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp  69, 71, 76–77, 77, 82n1, 305 Life of Pi 561n3 From Limelight to Satellite 491 Lincoln 213 Line of Duty 243–244 The Lion Has Wings 80 The Lion in Winter 231 Listen to Britain  71, 374 ‘A Literary Cinema?’ (essay)  144 literature and adaptation British Cinema  143–156 Hollywood 146–149 Little Dorrit 476 Little Voice 222–223 Littlewood, Joan  190 Lives of Performers 109 The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue 172 Lloyd Webber, Andrew  222 Loach, Ken  101 Loaded 358 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 226, 397, 480 Lockwood, Margaret  205–206, 206, 351 The Lodger 466 Lolita 190 Loncraine, Richard  138n9

London 69 London Film‐Maker’s Co‐op  109 London Orbital 486 The Loneliness of the Long‐Distance Runner 97 The Long Day Closes  138n7, 476, 477 The Long Good Friday 374 The Long Gray Line 537 Look Back in Anger  95, 357 The Looking Glass 395 Look Up and Laugh 55–56 Lord Jim 189 Lord of the Dance 230 Losey, Joseph  97, 189, 190, 191–192 Lourdeaux, Lee  536–537 Love and Death on Long Island 365–366 Love/Hate 397 Lovell, Alan  1, 178 Love on the Dole  52, 69 Low, Rachael, History of the British Film 9, 13, 15–17, 19, 280 The Luck of Barry Lyndon 149 The Luck of the Irish 242 Lumière, Louis  307 Lumière Cinématographe  7, 30 Lutyens, Elizabeth  219 LUX Critical Forum groups  124 The Mabinogion  516, 518 MacBride, Sean  315 MacCabe, Colin  291 MacDonagh, John  40 MacDonagh, Thomas  41 Mackendrick, Alexander  189, 190 MacKenzie, Paul  75 MacNamara, Walter  37 Mad about Mambo 396 Mad Dogs and Englishmen 225 Madeleine 182 Mad Men 341 Madonna of the Seven Moons  78–79, 149, 207–208, 212 Maeve  111–112, 114–115, 116, 390, 397 The Magdelene Sisters 399 Magical Mystery Tour 93 The Magic Box 7, 8, 303

Index 583 magic lantern shows  30, 31 The Magnificent Ambersons 81 Maguire, Franck Z.  8 Majdhar 447 Major, John  471 Mam 521 Mamet, David  154 Mamma Mia!  222–223, 225, 548, 552 Man About Dog 397 The Manchurian Candidate 211 Mandela 455 Mandy 102n2 A Man for All Seasons 92 The Man in Grey  78–79, 205, 206 The Man in the White Suit 88, 88 Mann, Daniel  211 Man of Aran 227–228 Mansfield Park 137n4 Manvell, Roger  13, 67–68, 70–71 The Man Who Fell to Earth 307 The Man Who Knew Too Much 60 The Man Within 182 The Manxman 466 Marcus, Laura  19–20 Margoyles, Miriam  113 The Marriage of Corbal 61 Marwick, Arthur  85 Mary Rose 466 Masala 450 masculinity 355–361 Mason, James  205 Massey, Doreen  408 The Master of Ballantrae 149 The Matchmaker 236 Match Point 480 Matheson, Richard  172 Mathieson, Muir  220 A Matter of Life and Death 69 Matthews, Jessie  57, 204 Maurice  131, 364 May ‘68 and Film Culture 108 Mayersberg, Paul  186, 190–191, 192 McArthur, Colin  119, 491, 495 McCabe, John  219 McCarey, Leo  189, 190 McCartney, Paul  224

McCreevy, Charlie  325 McDonagh, John Michael  234–235, 237, 257 McDowell, Malcolm  99 McFarlane, Brian  144–145, 151–152, 153, 155, 195–196 McGreevy, Thomas  265 McIlroy, Brian  247 McKillop, Ian  86 McLoone, Martin  107, 118, 248–250, 328, 415–416 Medhurst, Andy  72 Melody 225 Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema  394, 395 Mendes, Lothar  63 Menges, Chris  336 Men of the Lightship 78 Mercer, Kobena  449 ‘Method’ acting approach  201–202 Of Mice and Men 255 Michael Collins  227, 254 Midnight Cowboy 178 Midnight Express 231 The Midwich Cuckoos 97 Mildred Pierce 207 Miles, Bernard  186 Miles, Sarah  97–98 Millions Like Us  51, 59, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74–75, 79, 81 The Mill on the Floss 374 Mills, John  96 Milwr Bychan / Boy Soldier  516, 517 Ministry of Information (MOI)  70, 75–78 Minnelli, Vincente  184 The Miracle  254, 391, 395 Mirren, Helen  354 A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence  86–87, 194, 465 Mise Eire 228, 229 Mississippi Masala 450 Miss Julie 354 Mitchell and Kenyon  15, 30 Molesworth series  95 Molly‐O′ 540 Monahan, Barry  251

584 Index Mona Lisa 134 Money Behind the Screen 279 Monk, Claire  167, 168 Monopolies and Mergers Commission  284 Monroe, Marilyn  201–202 Montgomery, James  33–34, 45 Monty Python 474 Moon  423, 424, 425, 428, 431–434, 434, 439–440 Moondance 389 Moor, Andrew  194, 473 Morris, Ossie  305 Morvern Callar  145, 373, 382, 502 The Most Fertile Man in Ireland 396, 396 Mottershaw, Frank  10 Moulin Rouge 305 Movie  60, 90, 177, 179, 186–192, 194, 196, 197n8 Mr Deeds Goes to Town 417 Mr Nice 524 Mrs Miniver 79 Muller, Renate  61 Multi‐Language Versions (MLVs)  301 Mulvey, Laura  109–110 The Mummy 306 Mundy, John  169 Murphy, Pat  106, 109, 110, 111–112, 114, 239 Murphy, Robert  75, 82n2, 89, 92, 150, 166, 205, 300, 301 Murray, Jonathan  502 music, film see film music musicals 222–226 My Ain Folk 196n3 My Beautiful Laundrette 212–214, 213, 291, 336, 337, 447, 452, 551 My Childhood 196n3, 494 My Darling Clementine 181–182 In My Father’s Time 113 My Left Foot  213, 227, 255, 389, 391–392 My Son the Fanatic  145, 450 My Way Home 196n3 My Week with Marilyn 201–202 Nairn, Tom  471, 473 Naked 153 In the Name of the Father  229, 255, 394

Napper, Lawrence  20–21 Nation 54 National Archives, Kew  82n1 National Fictions 72–75 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 282 National Film Finance/funding Corporation 68 National Film Studios of Ireland (NFSI)  319–321 Nationalising Femininity 74 National Lottery British Cinema  282, 289 finance/funding  282, 289 A Nation Once Again 315 Neale, Steve  72 Neame, Ronald  180, 305 Negra, Diane  399, 416, 542 Nevill, Amanda  454–455 New Black Film Collective  457 the new cosmopolitans?, Irish Cinema  419–421 New Edinburgh Review 490 New Gaelic Man  388 A New Heritage of Horror 466 New Irish Cinema: 1993–2003 120 New Masculinity  358–359 New Questions of British Cinema 281 Newsinger, Jack  484–485 New Wave see also First Wave (Irish Cinema) British New Wave  208–211 ‘New Wave’ of British film realism  90–91, 97, 208–211 The Next of Kin  69, 78 NFFC (National Film Finance Corporation) 282 NFSI (National Film Studios of Ireland)  319–321 Ngakane, Lionel  446 Night Mail 53, 53 Night of the Living Dead 445 Nil by Mouth  131, 137n2 Nine Men  69, 71 No Lady 383n2 Noonan, Christine  99, 100 Noonan, Michael  328

Index 585 Nora 391 Northanger Abbey  137n4, 327 Northern Ireland Film Council  243 Northern Ireland Screen (NI Screen)  243–245 Nothing Personal  268–269, 394 Notting Hill  374, 443, 480 Novello, Ivor  20 Nowhere Boy 231 Numero Deux 116 Oakley, Charles  280 The Observer 49 Observer 522 O’Casey, Sean  45 Occi versus the World 395 O’Connor, Barbara  390, 391 O’Connor, Frank  46 Odd Man Out  182, 227, 228, 242, 250, 410–411, 410 O Dreamland 378 Off‐White Hollywood 540 O’Flaherty, Liam  43, 45 O’Flynn, Sunniva  110–111 Oh! What a Lovely War 223 Oireachtas na nGael 107 O’Laoghaire, Liam  315 Olcott, Sidney  34–35, 37, 314, 388, 389 The Old Curiosity Shop 241 ‘Old Land of My Fathers’ (Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau) 523–524 Oliver!  92, 223 Oliver Twist 147, 147, 182, 480 Olivier, Laurence  68, 97–98, 201–202, 220–221 O’Malley, Des  319–321 Once  229, 260–262, 261, 403 Once Upon a Time in the Midlands 137n2 Ondine  254, 395 One Full Moon (Un Nos Ola’ Leuad) 517 One of Our Aircraft is Missing 69 Only Fools and Horses 379 Opening Doors 243 The Open Road 303 Ophuls, Max  180 Ordinary Decent Criminal 397 Ó’Riada, Séan  228, 229

Orlando  131, 138n9, 477 Ormand, Julia  202 Orphans  373, 377, 382 Orwell, George  94, 471–472 O’Sullivan, Thaddeus  106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 239, 254 ‘Other People’s Diasporas’ 532 The Other Side of Sleep 403 O’Tuama, Sean  419 Our Boys  390, 394, 403n4 Ourselves Alone 45 Outcast 171 The Outcasts 390 Out of Here  397, 403, 420–421 Ové, Horace  446 Owain Glyndŵr 515 Oxford Opinion  186, 187, 188, 191 Pagliacci 62 Pandora and the Flying Dutchman 305 Pandora’s Box 374 panorama shows  30 Paranoiac 162 Parked  397, 403 Parker, Alan  229, 284–285, 336 Parker, Cecil  96 Parris, Matthew  85 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  263, 266, 269 A Passage to India  131, 231 The Passion of Remembrance 447 The Password Is Courage 189 Patagonia  463, 512–515, 513, 518–521, 524 Paul, Robert W.  10, 11, 13, 31–32 On a Paving Stone Mounted  110, 111, 112–113 Pawlikowski, Pawel  372–373 Paying the Rent 388 Peaky Blinders 342 Peeping Tom 162, 163, 198n16, 306, 350 Pelissier, Anthony  186 Penda’s Fen 343 Penguin Film Review 80 Penny Dreadful  242, 327 People of Ireland! 109 PEP (Political and Economic Planning)  277, 280, 282–283, 287 Performance  84–85, 87, 225

586 Index Perkins, V.F.  186, 187–189, 191–192, 197n10, 197n13 Perrier’s Bounty 397 personnel and technology  308–309 Persuasion 137n4 Petley, Julian  91 Petrie, Duncan  491, 495–496, 501 Pettitt, Lance  110, 111, 118 The Phantom of the Opera 222 Philadelphia, Here I Come 389 Phillips, Leslie  96 Photoplay  533, 541 Piccadilly 374 Picturegoer  81, 90 Pigs  239, 413 Pilgrim Hill 420 Pimpernel Smith  232n11, 465 Pink Floyd: The Wall 223 A Pint of Plain  110, 118 Pirie, David  162, 171 place, space, and architecture, British Cinema 372–383 place and space, Irish Cinema  407–421 Playboy of the Western World 228 The Playboys 391 Play for Today  334, 335, 338 Playing Away 447 Please Sir! 101–102 The Plough and the Stars 45 Plunkett and Maclaine 220 Poitier, Sidney  98 Poitin 111, 111, 120, 390 Polanski, Roman  92, 189, 190 Political and Economic Planning (PEP)  277, 280, 282–283, 287 Polygram 278 Porter, Vincent  86, 281 postcolonial theory, Irish Cinema  412 postfeminism gender and sexuality: British Cinema  352–354, 366 gender and sexuality: Irish Cinema  391–393, 399, 401, 403n3 Potter, Sally  138n9 Powell, Dilys  69, 196n6 Powell, Michael  180, 184, 192, 193–194

The Prehistory of the Crisis 123 The Prelude 271n8 Pressburger, Emeric  180, 184, 193–194 Presson Allen, Jay  103n5 Pressure  446, 452 Preview 335 Price, Dennis  95 The Price of Coal 558–559 Prick Up Your Ears 130 Pride  524, 525–527, 526 Pride and Prejudice  137n4, 147, 152 Pride and Prejudice – Bride and Prejudice  150, 481 Priest 365 Priestley, J.B.  472–473 The Prime Minister 69 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  100, 101 The Prince and the Showgirl 201–202 A Private Enterprise 446 A Private Function 476 The Private Life of Henry VIII 57, 58, 74, 278, 549 Private Potter 190 Project Arts Centre  123 Project Cinema Club  109, 124 The Projection of Britain 54 the proletariat, British Cinema  423–441 Provincial Cinematograph Theatres Ltd. 32 Psycho 162 P’Tang Yang Kipperbang 335 Pulleine, Tim  337 Punch 58 Quantum of Solace  548, 552 The Quarryman (Y Chwarelwr) 515 Quartet 232n11 Quatermass II 485 The Queen  337, 353–355, 366 Queen of Destiny 549 The Queen of Spades 182, 183 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 400 queers 361–366 The Quiet Man  35, 113, 227, 228, 230, 236, 317, 389, 413, 533, 537–539, 539 The Quiet Man … And Beyond 538

Index 587 Quigly, Isabel  96 Quinn, Bob  106, 107–108, 111, 121, 239 Quota Act  61, 220 ‘quota quickie’ films  19, 51, 59 race and ethnicity, British Cinema  443–458 Radio On 486 Rage 450 Ragtime  535, 542 The Rainbow 476 Raj Quartet 131 Rakes of Mallow 228 The Rake’s Progress 69 Ramsbottom Rides Again 90 Random Harvest 79 Rank, J. Arthur  278 Rank Organisation  68, 89, 180, 278, 279 Ratcatcher  373, 377, 382, 555 Rattigan, Terence  94–95, 202 Raw Meat 172 Ray, Nicholas  180 Ray, Ted  96 Rayns, Tony  187 RCA 301 Reach for the Sky 89 realism and the British New Wave  90–91, 97, 208–211 Rebecca  60, 79 Reckord, Lloyd  446 RED 354 Red Ensign  51, 59 Redmayne, Eddie  202 Red Road  373, 377, 382, 490, 502 The Red Shoes  184, 231, 305 Reed, Carol  144, 182 Reefer and the Model  250, 391 Reeves, Michael  192, 194 Regent cinema, Portsmouth  63, 79–80 Reggae 225 Regional Screen Agencies (RSAs)  285, 289 Reign of Fire  241, 326 Reisz, Karel  179, 189 The Remains of the Day  131, 132, 215, 375, 476 Remington Steele 319 Re: Public 123

Repulsion  92, 189 Rescue Me 542 Resistance 524 Reville, Alma  60 Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen 543 Rhode, Eric  69, 70 Rhosyn a Rhith (Coming up Roses) 517–518 Richard III 138n9 Richards, Jeffrey  2, 49, 53, 55, 75, 80, 137n1, 464, 526 Richards, Keith  84 Richardson, Tony  187 Riddles of the Sphinx 109 Riff Raff 553 Ripper Street 242 The Rising of the Moon 533 Riverdance  222, 230 Rivette, Jacques  159 Robert Murphy  86 Robin Hood 524 Robinson in Space 486 Rob Roy 149 Rocinante 117 Rockett, Kevin  109, 118, 120, 314–315, 328, 409–410, 535, 538 The Rocky Road to Dublin  109, 119, 122 Roger Deakins  309 The Rolling Stones  84, 85 Romulus (company)  97 Romulus Films  209 Ronson, Jon  256 Room  255, 329 Room at the Top  90, 97, 209–211, 211, 212 A Room for Romeo Brass 137n2 A Room With a View 131, 132, 168, 212, 357, 364–365 The Root of All Evil 207 Rory O’More  35, 36, 36 Rosaleen Dhu 388 Rose, David  343 Rose, William  89 Rose of Tralee 228 Rotha, Paul  12, 49, 50, 52, 70, 75–76 Round the Horne 474 Rowling, J. K.  551

588 Index Rowson, Simon  279 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art  203 A Royal Divorce 549 RSAs (Regional Screen Agencies)  285, 289 RTE: The Report on Women in Broadcasting 390 Rubber Soul 231 Russell, Ken  223 Rutherford, Margaret  95 Ryall, Tom  60, 160, 285 Ryan’s Daughter  227, 228, 270, 271n10, 410–411 S4C television/films  511, 515–520 Sabotage  60, 466 Sadoff, Dianne  149 Sadoul, Georges  10 Saint Joan 197n12 Salaam Bombay!  559 Sally’s Irish Rogue 317 Salt of the Earth 122 Saltwater 397 Saltzman, Harry  91 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid  214, 447, 551 Sammy Going South 189 Samuel, Raphael  475–476 Sandbrook, Dominic  85 San Demetrio, London  69, 70, 71, 79, 232n11 Sanders of the River 549 Sapphire  91, 354 Saraband for Dead Lovers 305 Sargeant, Amy  62 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 90, 91, 376 Savage  397, 402 Saville, Victor  57, 60–61 Saving Private Ryan 241 Scandal 130 The Scarlet Pimpernel 548 Schach, Max  61 Schlesinger, John  178, 187–188 Schneider, Alan  121 school settings, British Cinema  94–103 Scorsese, Martin  215 Scotch Reels  490, 495, 496, 497–501 Scotland: Global Cinema 498

Scottish Film Council  498 Scottish film criticism  490–503 deconstruction and devolution  500–503 definition and development  496–500 detachment, depression, and dreaming  492–496 Scottish Film Production Fund  498 Scott of the Antarctic 221 Scream of Fear 162 Screen  72, 109, 110, 116, 408, 447, 491 Screen Education 109 Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation  118, 411 Screening Irish‐ America 532–543 analysing Irishness  536–537 Ford, John  537–539 historical approaches  533–536 How the Irish Became White 539–541 Irish diaspora  532–533 Irishness after 9/11  541–543 The Quiet Man 537–539 Screening Scotland  491, 495 Screening the Past 46n3 Screen One 338 Screen Producers Ireland (SPI)  325 Screen Two 338 Sean Calleary  321 Searle, Humphrey  219 Searle, Ronald  95 Sears, Heather  209 Seaside Stories 395 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 353 The Secret Agent  60, 466 Secret Ceremony 190 The Secret of Roan Inish 236 The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball 225 Secrets and Lies 153 Section 481 (tax incentive), Irish Cinema  240, 241, 326, 327, 392 Seinfeld 542 Self, Will  474 The Selfish Giant 429 Self‐Portrait with Red Car  111, 121 Selma 455 Sensation  401, 402 Sense and Sensibility 137n4

Index 589 Sense and Sensibility, Kandukondain Kandukondain 150 Separado!  512, 524 Sequence  177, 179–188, 194, 196 Seven Psychopaths 237 The Seventh Veil 79 Sex, Class and Realism 87 sexuality and gender see gender and sexuality: British Cinema; gender and sexuality: Irish Cinema Shadowlands  131, 132 Shadow of a Doubt 185 Shakespeare in Love 231 Shalako 162 Shallow Grave  251, 499, 499 Shaun of the Dead  172, 251 Shearman, John  69–70 Sheehy, Ted  120 Sheeran, Patrick  419 Shenson, Walter  92, 93 She‐Play 450 Sheridan, Jim  254, 255 Sherwin, David  99 Ships with Wings  71, 80, 82n1 Shivas, Mark  186, 190–191 The Shore  244, 245 Short and Curlies 450 Shrooms 251 Siegel, Don  189 Sight & Sound  80, 90, 143, 179, 180, 181, 185, 187, 336, 342, 380–381, 417 Sightseers 486 Signoret, Simone  97–98, 209–210 Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 193 silent cinema  154 British Cinema  7–23 Sim, Alastair  95 Simba 445 Simien, Justin  456 Sims, Joan  97 Sinfield, Alan  356 Sinfonia Antarctica 221 Sinful Davey 318 Sing As We Go  49–50, 55–56, 56, 59, 170, 383n2 The Singer Not the Song 162

The Singing Detective 341 The Singing Street 102n4 Sinn Fein – The Worker’s Party  107, 109 Sinyard, Neil  86, 195 To Sir, With Love 98–99 Sixties British Cinema 86 Skeggs, Beverly  350 Under the Skin  423, 424, 425, 428, 431, 433–438, 437 The Skin Game 466, 467 A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy 120 Sleep Furiously  524, 527, 528 Sliding Doors 374 Slumdog Millionaire  231, 337, 547–548, 551, 553–561, 558, 559 as Glocal Realist Cinema  553–561 Small Engine Repair 395 Small Faces 477 Small Time 137n2 Smashing Time 223 Smith, G.A.  10 Smith, Maggie  100 Snatch 397 Solomon and Gaenor  516, 519 Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em 357 Some Mother’s Son 389 Some People  189, 192 Somers Town  131, 552 Song for a Raggy Boy  399, 403n7 The Song of Ceylon  54, 560 Song of the Plough  51, 59 A Son of Erin 534 Sons of the Sea 304 Sopocy, Martin  14 The Sopranos 341 The Sound of Music 92 sound technology  300–303 space, place, and architecture, British Cinema 372–383 space and place, Irish Cinema  407–421 Spare the Rod 97 Spark, Muriel  100 Sparrows Can’t Sing 190 Speak Like a Child 450–451 Spencer, Norman  143 SPI (Screen Producers Ireland)  325

590 Index Spicer, Andrew  194 Spin the Bottle 403n5 A Sprig of Shamrock 534 Squadron 992 78 Stage Fright 185 Standard 335 Stannard, Eliot  60, 194 Starred Up 456 The Stars Look Down 52 star system  21, 204 state support  313–314 Station Six – Sahara 190 Steedman, Carolyn  136 Stein, Paul  61 Stollery, Martin  54 Stoll Film Company  19 Stone, Andrew L.  189, 190 Strasberg, Lee, ‘Method’ acting approach  201–202 Strasberg, Paula  202 Street, Sarah  62, 98, 166, 310 St Trinian’s films  95 The Stuart Hall Project 455–456, 456 A Study in Terror 162 Sturges, Preston  180 Submarine 524 Sue Harper  86 Summer on the Farm 374 Summertime 398 In the Summertime 522 Sunshine on Leith 225, 226, 490, 503 S.W.A.L.K. 225 Swan Lake 360 Swanson, Gilllian  74 Sweet Sixteen 463 Synchro Projects 450 ‘Synge, Country and Western’ (essay)  250 ‘talent histogram’ (Movie) 189 The Tales of Beatrix Potter 223 The Tales of Hoffmann  184, 305 Target for Tonight 69 Tarr, Carrie  91–92 Tarzan and the Amazons 81 Tasker, Yvonne  399 Taste of Fear 162 A Taste of Honey  90, 97, 152, 187, 378, 555

Tauber, Richard  61, 62 Tawny Pipit 375 Taylor, Philip M.  75 Tea with Mussolini 353 Technicolor 303–305 technology British Cinema  298–311 colour 303–306 digital technologies  309–311 digital technology influence  293–294 Hollywood  300, 302, 304–305, 306, 308, 310 personnel and  308–309 sound 300–303 widescreen cinema and 3‐D  306–307 television Andrews, Hannah  293 Annan Report  290 Associated Communication Corporation 290 BBC Films  291 British Cinema  332–344 Caerdydd 519 Caughie, John  292 changing relations with  289–293 Channel 4 Television  212, 281, 284, 289, 291–293, 333–339, 343 Cinematograph Films Council  290 digital technology influence  293–294 Dr. Who 519 Film Four International  291 FilmFour Ltd  292–293 Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) 290 Film on Four  333–338, 343 Grade, Lew  290 Granada Television  290 Harry Potter franchise  294 MacCabe, Colin  291 My Beautiful Laundrette 291 ownership influence  90, 93 S4C television/films  511, 515–520 Terry Report  290 Torchwood 519 Trainspotting 291, 292 UK Film Council (UKFC)  293–294 Walter 333–338, 334

Index 591 Tel Quel 108 Temptation Harbour 182 Term of Trial 97–98 Territories 117 Terry Report  290 Tess 476 Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The Early Films 106 Thatcherite privatisation  281–282, 284 That’ll Be the Day  225, 383n2 That Sinking Feeling 497 There Will Be Blood 213 They Made Me a Fugitive 182 They Were Sisters 206–207 Things to Come 561n2 The Thin Red Line 401 Third Cinema  117 The Third Man 182 This England 375 This Happy Breed  59, 69, 74, 79, 305 This is England  131, 310, 482 This Is My Father 250 This is the Sea 230 This Other Eden 227 This Sporting Life  189, 190 In This World 556–557 Thomas, Ed  511 Thompson, Emma  215 Thompson, J. Lee  86, 189 The Three Hostages 466 Three Kings 383n2 Thunder Rock 69 Thursday’s Child 69 Thursday’s Children 102n4 Time 92 Of Time and the City 552 The Times 70 Titanic 232n10 The Titfield Thunderbolt 88 Today’s Cinema 68 Together 102n4 Tom & Viv 131 Tomb Raider 170 Tom Brown’s Schooldays 94 Tom Jones  91, 231, 306 Tommy 223 Top of the Lake 342 Top Spot 379

Torchwood 519 Touching the Void 310 Toulmin, Vanessa  15 Towers Open Fire 189–190 The Town 542 Traffic in Souls 37 Trainspotting  131, 154–155, 225, 226, 232n9, 291, 292, 337, 490, 501, 522, 558, 560 transatlantic cinema as British Cinema  547–553 transnational cinema, British Cinema as  545–547 transnational cinema and genre, Irish Cinema 246–252 transnational strategies, British Cinema  545–561 Traveller  111, 115–116, 120, 227 In Treatment 542 Trevelyan, John  90 ‘trickle‐down’ funding  240–242 Trilogy of Dust 122–123 Trojan Eddie 250 Trouble in Store 89 The Trouble with Sex 401 True Confessions 542 The Truth About Claire 391 The Truth Commissioner 396 The Tudors 327 The Tunnel 548–549 A Turnip‐head’s Guide to the British Cinema 336 Tushingham, Rita  92 Twenty‐Four Seven 137n2 Twin Town  137n2, 373, 463, 516, 519, 521 Two of Us 231 Tyneside Story 78 Tynged yr Laith (The Fate of the Language) 515 Typically British: A Personal History of British Cinema by Stephen Frears  9, 99 UK Film Council (UKFC)  143–144, 282 Digital Screen Network Scheme  293–294 New Cinema Fund  293–294 Ulysses 414 Joyce, James  32

592 Index Undercover 82n1 The Unfinished Conversation 456 United Artists  91, 92 Un Nos Ola’ Leuad (One Full Moon) 517 Up the Junction 225 Vampyres 172 Vanity Fair 150 Van Morrison  229 Varnel, Marcel  60–61 Vaughan Williams, Ralph  220 Veidt, Conrad  61, 63 Venus Peter 501 Vera Drake 482 Verga, Giovanni  267–268 Veronica Guerin 326, 326 Vesselo, Arthur  69 Victim 361–362 Victoria the Great 549 Vikings  242, 245–246, 327 Village of the Damned 97 Vincent Porter  86 Visibility: Moderate: A Tourist Film 112, 113–114, 114 Visions of Yesterday 137n1 The Visit 397 Viva 329 Waiting for Godot 255 The Wake Wood 252 Waking Ned  236, 417 Waking Ned Devine 230 Wales’ cinema cultures  510–529 cinema and the fate of the language 512–521 the contemporary scene  524–528 English‐Language Cinema  521–524 ‘three Wales model’  510–511 ‘two‐language nation’  518 Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain 78 Walker, Alexander  86, 91, 277 Walker, Pete  172 Walsh, Fintan  398, 399, 401–402, 403n7 Walter 333–338, 334 Walton, William  220–221 Waltzes of Vienna 62 Wanamaker, Zoë  202

War of Independence dramas  44 Warren, Norman J.  172 The War Zone 137n2 Waterbag  118, 120, 391 The Water Gypsies 302, 302, 374 Waterloo Road  69, 75, 79 Watt, Harry  71 Wattis, Richard  95 Waving the Flag  49, 59, 74 The Way Ahead  69, 70, 71, 73, 76 Wayne, Michael  551 A Way of Life  453, 524, 525 The Way to the Stars  69, 70 We Dive at Dawn  69, 70, 80 The Wednesday Play 334 Weight, Richard  469 Welcome to the Terrordome  450, 451 Welland, Colin  101 The Welsh Language Society (Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg) 515 We Need to Talk about Kevin 148 Went the Day Well?  71, 76, 465 Into the West  250, 389, 413 Western Electric  301 We the Ragamuffin 452 Whack‐O! 95 Wharton, Edith  215 What Not To Wear 353 What Richard Did  256, 402 Wheatley, Ben  338–341 Wheels  120, 390 When Brendan Met Trudy 415 When Love Came to Gavin Burke  41–42, 388 Where Angels Fear to Tread 131 In Which We Serve  69, 70, 71, 73, 79, 80, 81 Whisky Galore! and The Maggie 491 Whitebait, William  69, 89 The White Cliffs of Dover 79 White Mischief 130 For Whom the Bell Tolls 79 Who Wants to be a Millionaire 554, 558, 560 The Wicked Lady  78–79, 149, 206, 351 widescreen cinema and 3‐D technology  306–307 Wild About Harry 396 The Wild and the Willing 102n3

Index 593 Wilde, Oscar  17, 356 Wilder, Thornton  185 Wild West 450–451 Willemen, Paul  116–117, 248, 270 Williams, Brock  207 Williams, Michael  20 Williams, Michelle  201, 202 Williams, Raymond  138n8 Williamson, James  14 Williamson, Malcolm  219 Willis, Ted  96 Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn 40–41, 47n8, 389 Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn – A Story of the Penal Day 388 Willy Reilly and his Dear Colleen Bawn: A Tale Founded on Fact (novel)  39 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel uber Berlin) 445 The Wings of the Dove 476 Wings of the Morning 308 Winnington, Richard  69 Winterbottom, Michael  151–152 The Wire 542 Wish You Were Here  130, 383n2, 476 Witchfinder General 485 With or Without You 396 Wittig, Monique  121 Wolfenden Report  361–362 Wollen, Peter  193 Wollen, Tana  131

Woman in a Dressing Gown 96 Women in Love 92 Women’s Work in Film and Television, 1933–1989 309 Wonderwall 225 Wood, Robin  172, 177, 178, 192, 194 The Woodlanders 476 Working Title Films  551–552 Wrede, Caspar  190 Wright, Basil  70 Wright, Joe  152 Wuthering Heights  146, 147, 148, 149 X Factor 557 Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman) 515 Yellow Submarine 93 The Yellow Teddybears 102n3 Y Gwyll / Hinterland 520 You Made Me the Thief of My Heart 229 Young, Gwenda  540, 541 Young, Victor  228 Young Adam 145 Young and Innocent  60, 466 Young Cassidy 533 Young Soul Rebels 482 Your Highness 244 Zamora, Daniel  428–429, 431 Zardoz 319 Zulu  93, 306

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