Women at the edge: encounters with the Cornish coast in British film and television

Abstract

In this article, I explore the particular liminality of the Cornish coast and its representation in film and television through the figure of the woman at the cliff edge. This figure has been significant in representations of Cornwall, Britain's most south-westerly territory, across painting, literature, film and television since the beginning of the twentieth century, and has operated as a trope through which anxieties around identity and social change have been expressed and explored. Responding to recent calls by scholars in film and television studies to examine more closely the connections between painting and audio-visual media (e.g. Harper 2010), I consider the significance of the figure of the woman at the edge of the Cornish coast in representations of identity at moments of transition, for example in wartime or at other moments of profound social change. Drawing connections between the early twentieth-century paintings of Dame Laura Knight and film and television texts across the century, including the film While I Live (1947) and the television serials The Camomile Lawn (1992) and Coming Home (1998), I attempt to draw out and explore what might be described as a key ‘place-image’ of Cornwall, the woman at the cliff edge.