The British cinema: Eras of film

Abstract

The British film has a lengthy history which can be traced back to the pioneer stage of the medium in the late nineteenth century when Britain, along with the United States, Germany, France and other nations, staked claims to the invention of cinema. Dividing the hundred years plus of that history into ‘eras’, segments of historical time possessing a degree of internal coherence, has been done in a range of ways utilizing a medley of criteria. Many factors influence the construction of historical periods relating to cinema.From general film history comes the broad division common to all national cinemas between silent and sound cinema with the latter divisible further into the classical sound era (1930s-1950s), based on big studio production, and the post studio period (1960s to the present) with its more fragmented structures. Such periods also relate to the significance of cinema-going as a largely urban leisure activity which peaked in the 1940s, declined significantly in the post-war years, then began a kind of recovery in the 1980s in the context of a burgeoning and varied audio-visual environment. Laid upon those divisions are the momentous events of history – the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War – which had profound effects on the course of international cinema. Laid upon those factors is the history of one national cinema – that of America – which above all others has shaped and determined the course of many national cinemas through its economic, artistic and general cultural influence. The British cinema has been especially susceptible to American influence and one way of writing its history is in terms of the industry’s resistance to Hollywood domination both at the level of political and industrial impact and at the level of cultural influence. From the point of view of aesthetics and film form, film scholars have also devel-oped numerous conceptual schemes for the analysis of the British film. ‘Realism’, despite the somewhat elusive nature of the term, has been particularly important as a central concern for accounts of the national cinema. The cinematic lineage from the 1930s documentarists, led by John Grierson, through the wartime realism of films such as In Which We Serve (1942) and Millions Like Us (1943), to the British ‘new wave’ of working-class orientated films in the early 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and to recent film-makers such as Ken Loach, embodies atraditional view of the development of the British film though one based on a strong set of assumptions about the role of the cinema as social agent. Such assumptions have been challenged by recent writing on the British film and, as Alan Lovell has suggested, the “strongest positive thrust from the new scholarship has been an attempt to validate ‘anti-realist’ film-making” (2009: 7). Raymond Durgnat (1970) and Charles Barr (1977, 1986) have developed a critical strand which interrogated the enshrined status of the ‘realist’ documentary-influenced film. Conceptual couplets such as realism/fantasy, prestige film/genre cinema, documentary/fiction, popular cinema/art film, exterior/interior cinema and other variants enabled British film history to find places for the eccentric vision of Powell and Pressburger, for the Gainsborough costume melodrama, for the crime film, for popular comedies, for the Hammer horror film, and for a strong vigorous popular cinema neglected by orthodox critical opinion and counterposed to the restrained aesthetics of the ‘realist’ film. This chapter divides the history of British cinema into ‘eras’ that can be organizedaccording to some of the institutional and artistic factors, political history, global film history, film form and aesthetics mentioned previously. At various times in its history, the British film industry has been affected by other national industries, especially though not exclusively the American film industry, by domestic government legislation and by artistic currents of influence from popular Hollywood films and from European art cinemas. Like the British body politic, the British film is lodged between America and Europe with the industries of each offering different templates – popular cinema, the art film – for the development of a national cinema with a distinctive identity. In the 1940s, Lindsay Anderson suggested that “the British cinema seems to hover between the opposite poles of France and Hollywood” (1949: 113), while in the 1990s, Christopher Williams suggested that “British film-making is caught between Hollywood and Europe, unconfident of its own identity, unable to commit or develop strongly in either direction” (1996: 193). This chapter will trace the history of British cinema through various phases in which the numerous pressures, strains and influences on the cinematic institution acquire a specific form marking them as distinctive ‘eras’.