Introduction: Post-millennial British Art Cinema

Abstract

In recent years a number of new British filmmakers have emerged with feature length works that overtly reject the style and story-telling methods seen in mainstream British and Hollywood cinema, but instead demonstrate high levels of artistic sophistication and ambition. These filmmakers, their films, and the cultural and industrial spheres that have helped produce and sustain them, we would like to call ‘post-millennial British art cinema’. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television engage with some rich examples of post-millennial British art cinema, but they all show that the work of contemporary artists working with film in Britain does not always sit comfortably within most extant histories of British national cinema or film genre, including art cinema. Indeed, at the outset, we would like to point out that post-millennial British art cinema is not easily definable or classifiable, but is instead characterised by industrial and formal fluidity, and, often, by an ambivalence towards borders, be they generic, formal, aesthetic, cultural, industrial, technological, or, indeed, national. While we acknowledge the difficulties inherent in producing catchall terms for groups of films produced during specific historical periods and in often similar circumstances, a number of films and filmmakers have nevertheless emerged that deserve our critical attention, and it makes sense to look at these films and filmmakers within the contexts of British cinema history and within the remits of the broad concept of art cinema.