British Cinema History Research Articles

New Wave Women: Paying Attention to Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Scholarship in British film history has tended to suggest that the female characters in New Wave films are marginalised, dismissively associated with the trappings of consumer culture and responsible for the ultimate containment of their ‘Angry Young Men’ protagonists. In Sex, Class and Realism, which was published in 1986, John Hill situates the New Wave in relation to broader socio-economic and cultural changes in post-war Britain, including women’s shifting relationships with work, motherhood, family life and patterns of consumption. However, he concludes that the cycle failed to register women’s changing lives in the late 1950s and identifies the ‘dramatic and thematic subordination of female characters’ and a ‘streak of misogyny’ running through the cycle. Revisiting the treatment of women in the British New Wave, this article focuses on the characters Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and instead explores how Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field’s performances offer potent expressions of women’s changing lives in this period. Poised between representing individual desires, confidence and autonomy, and feelings of frustration, reserve and uncertainty, their performances vividly convey their characters’ experiences and expectations in ways that chimed with mobilities and new constructions of selfhood that were increasingly being practised by a ‘transition’ generation of young women in post-war Britain. I argue that Roberts’s and Field’s performances evoke the feelings of two different, working-class women, for whom expressions of assertiveness, sexuality and aspiration are shaped by contradictions, anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. In doing so, the article foregrounds and re-contextualises Roberts’s and Field’s contributions to the New Wave, recognising their representation of contemporary femininities in flux; and explores the promotion and critical reception of their roles, highlighting the tensions between social realism and glamour that shaped their New Wave stardom.

‘The same virile ability of Val Guest’: The Film Finances Archive and British Film-makers

This article draws upon the Film Finances Archive to propose an alternative hierarchy of British directors based on their ability to deliver films on budget and schedule rather than on the artistic qualities of their films. An analysis of the archive’s large collection of budgets and cost reports for British feature films since 1950 highlights which directors had a record of economical and timely delivery of their films. The article shows that the common distinction between auteur and journeyman directors does not necessarily map onto their efficiency as film-makers. In this way the article demonstrates how a particular archive can offer new ways of thinking about British cinema history based on the professional discourses of the film industry.

‘The highest salary ever paid to a human being’: Creating a Database of Film Costs from the Bank of England Archive

Following the Cinematograph Films Act 1938, the Bank of England produced a ledger of film production costs, itemising British films produced between April 1938 and November 1939. This article will demonstrate how this ledger, and the subsequent database I have created based on it, can be of benefit to researchers of British film history. The detailed database contains the estimated final costs of 170 British films, including The Citadel, The Drum, The Lady Vanishes, Pygmalion, Sixty Glorious Years, A Yank at Oxford, Jamaica Inn and The Mikado with an accurate breakdown of costs for particular categories. The database can show researchers the impact of American investment in British film production, as well as details of the salaries of the highest paid stars and directors of British films made during this period.

Jill Craigie, Post-war British Film Culture and the British Film Academy

This article seeks to locate the socialist feminist film-maker Jill Craigie in the British film culture of the post-war period. Long regarded in scholarly accounts as something of an outsider, a woman who was effectively shut out of the industry during the 1950s, this article seeks to position Craigie rather differently. While acknowledging the obstacles she undoubtedly faced, it details aspects of her achievements and her visibility in the British film culture of the immediate post-war period. Craigie's politically driven documentaries and realist film practice accorded with prevailing discourses of ‘quality’ and she acquired the status of what would today be termed a media personality who worked across film, radio, television and print media. Considering Craigie as a figure embedded in the British film establishment, this article gives particular emphasis to her role in the British Film Academy (BFA), arguing that the significance of this practitioner-led organisation has yet to be fully recognised in British film history. The argument draws on archives held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to begin a discussion of how the BFA, and Craigie as the first woman to be elected to its Management Council, played its part in the development of British film culture.

International Sexpionage!European Popular Film on Sixties British Cinema Screens

The history of British cinema is often approached from the perspective of charting and analysing the history of British film production, taking in the contribution made by directors, actors, writer...

The British Reporter on Screen

This article considers the representation of tabloid journalists in 1930s British cinema. It argues that during this period, British films showed journalists to be collaborating with state powers to maintain a stable society. They also depicted reporters as not adhering to any recognised ethical framework. As a result, cinematic journalists in 1930s Britain differ markedly from later, better-known fictional reporters, as they do not challenge inequalities or uphold principles of ethics. The 1930s saw the consolidation and expansion of the popular press in Britain, as well as a boom in cinemagoing. The depiction of the relatively novel ‘type’ of the tabloid reporter in fiction films in this period therefore had the potential to greatly impact the public’s view of the journalism profession. The article highlights how this under-researched period in British film history gives important indications of the place of the reporter in the country’s popular imagination, in this decade.

An Adaptable Aesthetic: Theodor Sparkuhl's Contribution to Late Silent and Early Sound Film-making at British International Pictures, 1929–30

The German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl worked at Elstree from 1929 to 1930. Accounts of this period in Britain have often emphasised the detrimental effects of the arrival of the sound film in 1928, how it sounded the death knell of film as an international medium and how the film industry struggled to adapt (economically, technically, aesthetically). However, this article shows that the international dimension of the film industry did not disappear with the coming of sound and British International Pictures (BIP) was an exception to what Robert Murphy has called the ‘catalogue of failure’ during this turbulent period in British film history. Sparkuhl indisputably contributed to this achievement, working as he did on eight feature films in just two years from around July 1928 to April 1930, as well as directing several BIP shorts. Sparkuhl's career embodies the international nature of the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany he moved within very different production contexts, from newsreels to Ufa and the Großfilme; in Britain from big-budget films aimed at the international market to low-scale inexpensive films at BIP. As what Thomas Elsaesser has called an ‘international adventurer’, Sparkuhl cannot be contained within any single national cinema history. The ease with which he slipped in and out of different production contexts demonstrates not just his ability to adapt but also the fluidity between the different national industries during this period. In this transitional phase in Britain, Sparkuhl worked on silent, part sound and wholly sound films, on films aimed at both the international and the indigenous market, and in genres such as the musical, the war film and comedy. The example of Sparkuhl shows that German cameramen were employed not only for their aesthetic prowess but also for their efficiency and adaptability.

‘Another, more sinister reality’: Class, Youth and Psychopathology from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Endless Night

This article analyses how the protagonists of films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959), The Collector (1965), Blow Up (1966), Twisted Nerve (1968) and Endless Night (1972) were understood in relation to debates over the supposed perils of the new affluence and the erosion of class distinctions that it was presumed to entail. In particular it examines the terms in which these issues were discussed within contemporaneous reviews of the films, terms that were insistently psychological. These protagonists, as well as, to a certain extent, the actors who played them, were seen as representing a nightmare image of a ‘new’ working class that no longer ‘knew its place’, and as manifesting psychological problems that were associated with this intermediate status. Their psychologies were interpreted by many critics as being distinguished by a sense of isolation from external reality and by a hostile relationship to the world characterised by a psychopathic lack of empathy. Such concerns could be seen as establishing certain parallels between working-class realism and the contemporaneous horror film, and indeed the reviews cited in this article demonstrate that working-class realism and horror were seen as having shared points of interest in the 1960s, points that have often been repressed by the tendency to compartmentalise British cinema history into separate or even opposed ‘traditions’.

A Dalek is (now) a many-splendored thing

Colour remains an under-researched area of British cinema history. This case study from the ‘Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85’ project explores aesthetics in adaption by investigating the transition from the black-and-white television series Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-present) to the feature film Dr Who and the Daleks (Flemyng, 1965).

Black British Women Filmmakers in the Digital Era: New Production Strategies and Re-Presentations of Black Womanhood

Abstract The story of Black women in British mainstream cinema is certainly one of invisibility and misrepresentations, and Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history. Up until the mid-1980s, there were no Black female directors in Britain. Pioneers like Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille and Ngozi Onwurah have actively challenged stereotypical representations of Black womanhood, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory. In the 2010s, it seems that the British film industry remains mostly white and masculine. But the new millennium has brought a digital revolution that has enabled a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. New strategies of production have emerged through the use of online crowdfunding, social media and video-sharing websites. These shifts have opened new opportunities for Black women filmmakers who were until then often excluded from traditional means of exhibition and distribution. I will examine these strategies through the work of Moyin Saka, Jaha Browne and Cecile Emeke, whose films have primarily contributed to the re-presentation of Black womanhood in popular culture.

I. Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History

I. Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith (eds), <i>The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History</i>

Space, Place, and Realism

John Hill has described the ways in which male-centered narratives of British “working-class films” of the 1980s and 1990s mobilize the idea of the working-class community as “a metaphor for the state of the nation.” Writing on films of the same era by women directors, Charlotte Brunsdon deems it more difficult to see these films as “representations of the nation.” There are, she writes, “real equivocations in the fit between being a woman and representing Britishness.” This article explores this issue, arguing that the history of British cinema to which Hill's chapter contributes is not only bound up with a particular sense of British national identity, but founded on a particular conception, and use, of space and place. Taking Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006) as its case study, it asks what it is about this sense of space and place that excludes women as subjects, rendering their stories outside of and even disruptive of the tradition Hill describes. Finally, drawing on feminist philosophy and cultural geography, it suggests ways in which answering these questions might also help us think about the difficult questions raised by Jane Gaines, in a number of articles, around how we might think together feminist film theory and film history.

Introduction: Post-millennial British Art Cinema

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.

"You Can’t Have It On A Plate Forever": the English class system implodes in Losey and Pinter’s The Servant

The collaboration between Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey on the 1963 film The Servant represents a high point in the history of British cinema. Whilst acknowledging the film’s technical and cinematic merits, I argue in this paper that The Servant remains an essentially English film. Pinter’s idiomatic dialogue illuminates the intricate hierarchical structures and prejudices of the English class system. This makes the film essentially ’idiomatic’in its depiction of a particular historical and ideological moment, a time when the class system was in crisis and the political and cultural upheavals of the later 1960s were already in sight.

3D UK? 3D History and the Absent British Pioneers

The recent television ‘rediscovery’ of a small cohort of 1950s British 3D films (and the producers who made them) has offered a new route into considering how the historical stories told about 3D film have focused almost exclusively on the American experience, eliding other national contexts. This article challenges both the partiality of existing academic histories of 3D and the specific popular media narratives that have been constructed around the British 3D pioneers. Offering a rebuttal of those narratives and an expansion of them based around primary archival research, the article considers how the British 3D company Stereo Techniques created a different business and production model based around non-fiction short 3D films that stand in contrast to the accepted view of 3D as an American feature film novelty. Through an exploration of the depiction (and absence) of these 3D pioneers from existing media histories, the article argues for a revision to both 3D studies and British cinema history.

The Struggle for History: Lindsay Anderson Teaches Free Cinema

In spring 1986, Lindsay Anderson appeared in a television programme on British cinema. This was part of a series of three under the heading British Cinema: Personal View, produced by Thames Television. Anderson's contribution, Free Cinema 1956–? An Essay on Film by Lindsay Anderson, was written and directed by him. He was also the star of the programme, providing a lecture on the history of British cinema with himself at the very core, although, at the time of the production, Anderson's career was in decline and he was not involved in any film projects. Drawing on press materials, the programme itself and Anderson's personal papers in the University of Stirling library, this article analyses Anderson's personal conception of Free Cinema – according to his understanding, a short-lived documentary movement in the 1950s which eventually transformed itself into a series of feature films in the ensuing decades, particularly his own trilogy If…. (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). The polemic in the programme was particularly aimed at the general idea of the British Film Year of 1985 and at the successful film producer David Puttnam, at the time well known for his contribution to what was sometimes called the ‘New British Cinema’ of the 1980s. Anderson, however, dismissed Puttnam as a film-maker concerned only with Oscars and economic success, and instead lauded the qualities of ‘Free Cinema’, a realist, non-conformist and radical aesthetic, as the most artistically rewarding tradition in British cinema. The programme was highly entertaining and was generally well received by the British press, but did not really strengthen Anderson's position within the British film industry, which might, or might not, have been Anderson's intention.

The Art and Craft of Producing Films: Simon Relph

Simon Relph has become a forgotten figure in British cinema history and yet he made a major contribution both as a successful independent film-maker from c.1981 to 2005 – making twenty films as either producer or executive producer (see filmography) – and as the first chief executive of British Screen (1985–1990), the successor to the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC).1 Relph’s grandfather, George (1888–1960), was a distinguished stage and film actor, while his father Michael (1914–2005), who formed a long-term partnership with director Basil Dearden, was a successful production designer, writer and producer working principally at Ealing Studios. Although he initially resisted following in their footsteps, Simon Relph gradually became convinced that film and theatre were his real passion. He started out as a third assistant director on a television series at Rank’s Beaconsfield Studios in 1961, working his way to first assistant director on the Betty Box-Ralph Thomas comedy Hot Enough for June (1964). Box became a mentor, encouraging Relph to learn about the whole craft of film-making, including preand post-production work, which stimulated an interest in producing rather than directing. Thus although Relph continued to work as assistant director on a number of prestigious productions at Pinewood and Shepperton studios in the 1970s – including Roman Polanski’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971), John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974) and John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979) – he moved inexorably towards producing. His opportunity came on Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a major American production filmed in the UK. Relph was hired as assistant director but took over as executive producer when Charles MacGuire,

Reclaiming the 'vanilla' DVD: brand packaging and the case of Ealing Studios

The article explores the physical packaging and basic features of the 'vanilla' DVD releases, those basic DVD releases that are often overshadowed by flashier special editions with extra features. The essay argues that packaging and other features are under-explored within academic studies of DVD, or of the DVD industry, yet these help to create the initial expectations of audiences around traditional concepts such as genre, star or narrative. The main case study (Ealing Studios) develops an argument around the importance of studio branding to DVD packaging, and demonstrates how such branding can reinforce existing characteristics drawn from popular British cinema history.

Film Finances and the British New Wave

This article explores the role of Film Finances Ltd in supporting the films of the British new wave focusing on six key films: Room at the Top, The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar. It evaluates what the Film Finances Archive reveals about the production of these films and their budgets and box-office performance. The article demonstrates that Film Finances played a key role in encouraging new directors and artistes during a period of flux and transformation for the British film industry. It also sheds new light on the cultural and political economies of an important movement in British cinema history.

From inventor to renter: The middleman, the production crisis and the formation of the British film industry

The concept of the ‘second birth of cinema’ developed by André Gaudreault offers a new model for thinking about the development of early cinema. By proposing a new paradigm for the relationship between ‘pre-cinema’, early cinema and the formation of cinema as an institution, Gaudreault calls into question both our understanding of this crucial developmental period in cinema history, and our understanding of what cinema is, harking back to André Bazin’s question, ‘What is cinema?’ Gaudreault’s thesis is partly predicated on the acceptance that there is such a thing as the ‘institution of cinema’, and that the formative parts of this institution coalesced around the same time; hence the second birth of cinema. Such an idea is echoed in other theories of cinema’s development, including Noel Burch’s ‘institutional mode of representation’ and Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of narrative integration’. Yet these are stylistic concepts, suggesting therefore that the ‘institution of cinema’ marks a moment of aesthetic development and standardization and implies that industrial developments ran concurrently with that of style. The early history of the British film industry problematizes this idea, since while the wider cinema industry grew, the production sector declined. This article explores a formative period of development for the British film industry from 1908–1911. It examines the crisis in British production and the rise of the rental and foreign sales sectors of the industry in the light of Gaudreault’s paradigm, and assess how this idea of cinema’s second birth can help our understanding of this key moment in British film history.