Post-war British Cinema: Constructing an Imagined Community Through National Cinema

Abstract

Benedict Andersons masterpiece Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has influenced the discipline of national cinema greatly since its publication . This paper aims to decode British national cinema from the late 1940s to early 1960s to rediscover the situation of British society at that time through Andersons conception of imagined communities. Through reading closely on two representative British films A Matter of Life and Death (Emeric Pressburge, 1946) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), the paper portrays the great changes happened in Britain from the end of the the Second World War to the beginning of the 1960s.