Revisiting British Film Studies

Abstract

As is well-known, the academic study of film, and certainly its institutionalisation within the education system, is a relatively modern development that still has the capacity to arouse anxiety among certain educationalists and social commentators. The emergence of British film studies as a specific field of enquiry is also a relatively recent phenomenon and, as recently as the 1970s, it was still possible to read only a handful of books in order to be familiar with all of the relevant literature. The subsequent growth of serious writing on British cinema, therefore, gives rise to questions about the way in which British film studies emerged, how the British cinema came to be regarded as worthy of study and the conceptual basis on which it was conducted. The entry of film into the academy partly depended upon the acceptance of film as an object worthy of study. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the cultural field has historically been ‘organised according to a hierarchy’ that has defined ‘cultural legitimacy and its gradations’ (1990: 95). If this is so, then the ‘legitimisation’ of film as a valued form of cultural expression may be seen to have involved a history of ‘classification’ struggles. In the case of film, the battle for legitimacy initially depended upon the adoption of the criteria of the ‘high’ arts and an invocation of the director as the key creative personality – or author – involved in the film-making process. However, it was the legitimacy of Hollywood as art that involved the hardest-fought battles and it is undoubtedly the case that the British cinema initially fell victim to this new-found enthusiasm for US films. This was, of course, most evident in Movie, the Cahiers du Cinemainfluenced journal that first appeared in 1962 and that was primarily devoted to the celebration of Hollywood films. In a famous editorial written by Victor Perkins on behalf of the editorial board, the British cinema was compared unfavourably to both European cinema and Hollywood and then roundly trashed for its lack of ‘style, imagination’ and ‘personality’ (which, as the chart that appeared in the first issue indicated, was seen as the result of a lack of genuine auteurs working in the British cinema). In this regard, the legitimisation of British