Abstract
The crisis in film studies and history concerning their legitimacy and objectives has provoked a reinvigoration of scholarly energy in historical enquiry. ‘New film history’ attempts to address the concerns of historians and film scholars by working self-reflexively with an expanded range of sources and a wider conception of ‘film’ as a dynamic set of processes rather than a series of texts. The practice of new film history is here exemplified through a detailed case study of the independent British producer Michael Klinger (active 1961–87) with a specific focus on his unsuccessful attempt to produce a war film, Green Beach, based on a memoir of the Dieppe raid (August 1942). This case study demonstrates the importance of analysing the producer's role in understanding the complexities of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter – an undercover raid and a Jewish hero – disturbed the dominant myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be intractable ideological as well as financial problems. The paper concludes that the concerns of film historians need to engage with broader cultural and social histories.
Highlights
Through different pressures, the study of history has experienced a crisis of confidence
It is within this shifting and dynamic context that new film history has emerged, one that is theoretically informed with a „self-reflexive awareness of its own discursive processes of writing and mediation‟ (Gledhill and Williams 2000, 297-98)
My analysis of Klinger is based on an archive of new primary material – the Michael Klinger Papers (MKP) – that was deposited at the University of the West of England in 2007 by his son, Tony Klinger
Summary
The success of Get Carter enabled Klinger to mount a more ambitious production programme in the 1970s, the highpoint of which was two international actionadventure films: Gold (Peter Hunt, UK, 1974) and Shout at the Devil (Peter Hunt, UK, 1976) based on Wilbur Smith‟s middle-brow novels (Spicer 2010) In these productions, Klinger became the fulcrum of a highly complex film-making process involving lengthy negotiations with possible financiers in which the key creative agent was the producer himself allied to commodity fiction (Smith‟s popularity) and the box-office clout of his stars (in particular Roger Moore) rather than the director. Producers have a vital cultural function, as I shall try to demonstrate through my case study of Green Beach
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