British Filmmakers Research Articles

Erasing “Knowable Communities”: From Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Brassed Off

The paper discusses cinematic representations of working class communities in British cinema from the pre-war documentary movement to (post-)Thatcher feature films chronicling the decline of traditional industries. A particular focus is given to contrasting Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Mark Herman’s Brassed Off. The former title serves as a model example of British New Wave cinema, marking the “discovery” of the working class with its “knowable communities” that revealed them to the general public. The latter film provides an apt illustration of the impact and consequences of Thatcherism on the very same communities. The paper elaborates on selected narrative and visual motifs, investigating the ways in which British filmmakers have striven to depict social changes in British society over the consecutive decades.

The World Turned Upside Down, Again: Hauntings of the English Revolution and Archaeologies of Futures Past in Contemporary British Films

In the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the Civil War and the English Revolution featured prominently in a variety of films ranging from the mainstream historical drama Cromwell to the independent Winstanley and the folk horror film Witchfinder General. Film-makers’ interest in the period at that time coincided with the cultural, social and political turmoil of 1968 as well as with the increasingly popularised revision of the period in Marxist historiography, such as Christopher Hill’s seminal book The World Turned Upside Down. Recently, there has been a renewed interest of British film-makers in Hill’s focus on the subcultures of the English Revolution, such as the Diggers, as well as in the aesthetics of earlier films about the period. This article analyses two contemporary films about the period, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Thomas Clay’s Fanny Lye Deliver’d, and through historicisation and contextualisation within film, genre and media history seeks to understand the significance of their return to the historical material of the seventeenth century as well as to the style of their filmic models from the 1960s and 1970s. The article argues that the two films perform an ‘archaeology of the future’ (Jameson) that excavates utopian ‘futures past’ (Koselleck) in British cultural history as well as in British film and media history. By analysing Wheatley and Clay’s films as hauntological and archaeological texts, the article explores the potential of the cinematic image for engaging with national and film history as well as with visions of the past and the future.

Contemplating imperialism: early film reenactments of the South African War

ABSTRACT This essay examines the differences between American and British modernity around the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues that American modernity tended to paradoxically embrace what was considered premodern, while British modernity sought to more clearly dichotomize what was perceived as rural primitivity and civil British modernity. To elucidate these ideological differences, theories of modernity and antimodernity are addressed in tandem with close textual analyses of early film reenactments of the South African War (1899–1902). While British film reenactments of the South African War tended to reify British imperialism, American films were often ideologically ambivalent, thus providing more of an opportunity for American exhibitors and audiences to contemplate and discern British imperialism for themselves. This study also explores theoretical questions related to reenactment and simulated reality, specifically how British filmmakers, unlike American filmmakers, constructed a clear distinction between civility and primitivity as real.

‘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.

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

Unproductive Co-production: European Integration, the British Film Industry and the Franco-British Co-production Agreement of 1965

The negotiation of bilateral co-production agreements had a major impact on European film-making from the 1950s to the 1970s. These agreements also provided the basis for the closer integration of Europe's film industries within what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). However, the British government was slow to adopt co-production arrangements and British film-makers tended to be more reticent about using them once they were made available. This article examines the British experience of European co-production during this period, focusing on the negotiation and implementation of the Franco-British co-production agreement of 1965 in the context of broader debates about film production and policy within the EEC. Particular attention is given to Someone Behind the Door (1971), a proposed Franco-British film which was ultimately made as a collaboration between French and Italian production companies after delays on the British side caused the French producer to withdraw from the UK. The correspondence collected by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) as the proposal for Someone Behind the Door was processed – including input from film union and producer associations – provides a unique insight into the bureaucratic policies and procedures which encumbered European co-production in Britain. While continental film-makers established comfortable habits of cooperation, British co-production was stymied from the outset by a misalignment between the interests of Britain's government, its film unions and its producers.

FESPACO Past and Future: Voices from the Archive

FESPACO Past and Future:Voices from the Archive June Givanni (bio) Introduction FESPACO came into being in an era of struggle for independence, when Fanonian principles of self-determination and decolonization of the mind were necessary prerequisites to that process, and any historical review of its existence will find these key purposes as significant drivers for all constituencies of users (visitors/participants) and those who value festivals—audiences, filmmakers, actors, writers, technicians, curators and programmers, critics, policy makers, cultural activists, archivists, and others. All hold not only memories, but opinions based on their own experiences of this major festival that gathers people from across the continent and across the globe to explore, promote, and celebrate African cinema. To provide an idea of the position from which my comments and observations are made, I am writing as a curator and programmer of Pan-African cinema1 and an archivist by necessity from the pre-digital era; and as someone who has been a regular attendee at FESPACO since 1985 during the Sankara era—in all of those capacities. I have not only my own observations2 and experiences of FESPACO, but in the shape of the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) I have captured, recorded, and gathered materials that witness the festival's history over those years and the views and experiences of many other professionals and local fans of cinema at the festival. Of course mine is not a unique position—other collectors from their position have also done the same; notably the Tunisian archivist and filmmaker Mohammed Chalouff who has assiduously recorded the history of both FESPACO and its twin festival JCC (Journée Cinématographique de Carthage) for many decades in the form of a number of publications and films. Most recently, in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of FESPACO, the JGPACA organized an installation of films made at the festival over the years (with in-kind support from FESPACO, Black Camera at Indiana University, and AiM), where the films were open to all visitors to the JGPACA stand at [End Page 301] the MICA (The International Market for TV and African Cinema) all day to view on five screens with headphones, and we held lunchtime discussions at the stand with the filmmakers concerned present at FESPACO who we invited to discuss their work with spectators and colleagues.34 The materials I have gathered in the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive are not exhaustive and were not collected to present an objective assessment (some years later) of the film festivals and of Pan-African cinema. So there is not only subjectivity in the collections in the archive and in my views on FESPACO, there are also limitations of formats and of deterioration which have an impact on what is available for such a reflection. However, there are materials in various formats from FESPACO over those years to be found in the archive, including films shot at FESPACO by various filmmakers. The JGPACA archive materials contain the views of others including many filmmakers and industry professionals and some of those responsible for staging FESPACO, which—in addition to my own memories, experiences, and impressions—I will use to address a few key points that might contribute to this collection of ideas around FESPACO past, present, and future. One of the underlying sources of cinematic ideas that I think is important to mention here relates to the significance of Third Cinema which was the platform around which I began to engage with and shape ideas around the potential for cinema as a liberating force, in working on London's Festival of Third World Cinema 'Third Eye' in London in 1983,5 and is therefore evident in the archive at various levels. Third Eye was a festival where filmmakers and other film professionals from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, the Indian sub-continent, as well as African American and Black British filmmakers were gathered for a two week film festival in London and a four-day Symposium (which continued the following year with a focus on Black British cinema). Third Cinema and Third Eye signalled a clear context for the revolutionary role of cinema and the...

Learning by watching, doing and ‘having a chat’: developing conceptual knowledge in the UK film & TV industry

ABSTRACTResearch from both academic and industry sources has repeatedly identified a mismatch between theory and practice in film and TV professionals’ education. A recent report for the British Film Institute has concluded that the skills provision for the industry is not fit for purpose. This investigation aims to reconcile the educational expectations of students, educators and employers and is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with British film-makers attending the Cannes Film Festival. The interviews trace their process of updating skills and know-how to meet the requirements of highly dynamic workflows and so provide a deeper understanding of the mental models underlying the film-making process. Preliminary findings lay the foundation for a grounded theory approach to a study of conceptual knowledge in film-making. Interview analysis establishes the core concept ‘learning by doing’ that gains meaning by deep integration with highly personal and diverse skills development strategies. The film-makers demonstrate how ‘doing’ is affected by previously watched films, by collaborator focused forms of ‘critical thinking’, based on constant communication with collaborators. These combined factors enable the production team’s increasingly shared vision of a film in preproduction. The findings are discussed in the context of established reflective practice concepts to enhance student employability.

Empire, Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

ABSTRACTThis article examines efforts by a range of British visitors to produce ‘home movies’ or amateur film of Kenya from 1928 to 1972, and attempts by both the British film-makers and Kenyans to navigate and influence this production. By bringing cine-cameras to Kenya to record images to be consumed back in the metropole by family and friends as ‘holiday films’, these British visitors laid bare what a number of historians have identified as the ‘imperial gaze’ that defined both colonial and post-colonial conceptions of Africa. Colonialism’s obsession with ordering and positioning bodies within a projected image of power and control made cinema the perfect vessel for such an exercise, while amateur film, with its often clumsy framing and highly personal interaction between the film-maker and the film subject, grants us unique insight into the sometimes coercive, transactional and forced efforts involved in projecting such an image. The amateur films that sit at the centre of this article, which were produced by British visitors to Kenya both before and after independence, offers us the opportunity to examine the wide range of behaviours of both the film-maker and the filmed which underpinned the production of repetitive imperial image-making in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.

Inventing London: Derrida's Legacies in Sally Potter'sYesand Anthony Minghella'sBreaking and Entering

Taking Jacques Derrida's multi-faceted notion of invention as a common denominator of on the one hand artistic practice and, on the other, the writing strategies of deconstruction, this article investigates the ethics of cinematic expression in a reading of two examples of twenty-first-century British filmmaking, Sally Potter's Yes and Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering. Both films deploy the demographically diverse cityscape of contemporary London as the stage for their respective geopolitical concerns – that is, post-9/11 in the case of Yes and anxieties surrounding the EU expansion in the case Breaking and Entering – and set out to explore the destructive as well as the convivial possibilities of serendipitous encounters along cultural, social and gender divides. In so doing, they articulate a dual ontology, one which is situated in the reality of present-day politics and one which enacts the messianic structure of deconstruction. More importantly, they do so by reflecting on the transformative potential of invention, whether in the guise of literature, architecture, acrobatics, music or film. The first part of this article touches upon experimentalist features and themes in Yes and relates them to instances of Derridean ethics; the second part is more narrative-oriented and focuses on a parallel reading of Derrida's ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ and Minghella's portrayal of King's Cross, a north London area in transition, as a deconstruction of cosmopolitanism, that is an instantiation of the semi-concept of the city of refuge.

When Peter Met Sergei: Art Cinema Past, Present and Future inEisenstein in Guanajuato

Peter Greenaway has established himself as one of British cinema's most distinctive film-makers. Yet he also remains one of its most controversial and problematic figures. In the 1980s and early1990s, alongside Derek Jarman, Greenaway came to embody British art cinema. He subsequently has taken on the paradoxical status of a major film-maker who simultaneously exists on the margins. He has also become a self-imposed exile who believes that his unique brand of art cinema is best appreciated on the continent. In effect, Greenaway has become British art cinema's prodigal son. This article focuses on Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), a semi-fictionalised account of the ten days that Eisenstein spent in the city of Guanajuato while filming the uncompleted Que Viva Mexico! The article argues that what makes Eisenstein in Guanajuato so resonant is the way in which Greenaway both celebrates cinema's past while also daring to suggest a possible future. Indeed, while this article will show that the film is part of a new phase in Greenaway's career which is devoted to biographical films about artists, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is no simple biopic of Eisenstein. Rather, it offers a complex fusion of both the Russian and British film-makers’ theories about the cinema, particularly their shared interest in film aspect ratios and the concept of the total art work. Furthermore, it stands as a superb illustration of Greenaway's vision of cinema as an interactive and encyclopaedic medium. As this is a co-production between the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland and Mexico, which featured no British investment and, at the time of writing, has yet to be shown in the UK, this article will also show that we require new ways of theorising art cinema not only in British but also in international contexts.

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.

Red Roads from Realism: Theorising Relationships between Technique and Theme in the Cinema of Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold is one of the most critically discussed and debated of all early twenty-first-century British film-makers. This article starts from the proposition that the unusual amount of attention that Arnold's work has attracted to date stems not only from its undeniable cinematic accomplishment, but also its ambiguous positioning vis-à-vis domestic film and television traditions (primarily social realist ones). Taking Arnold's debut feature Red Road (2006) as a major case study and using Fish Tank (2009) and Wuthering Heights (2011) for comparison, I attempt to respond to that ambiguity by outlining and providing illustrative examples of certain key characteristics, both formal and thematic, of Arnold's feature-length films. These include her typical privileging of the individual and psychological over the collective and social, her pronounced interest in challenging binary oppositions between ideas of the human and the animal, and her highly developed awareness and expressive use of audiovisual form and style.

Screening Vienna: The City of Dreams in English-Language Cinema and Television by Timothy K. Conley

Reviewed by: Screening Vienna: The City of Dreams in English-Language Cinema and Television by Timothy K. Conley Laura A. Detre Timothy K. Conley, Screening Vienna: The City of Dreams in English-Language Cinema and Television. Amherst, ny: Cambria Press, 2016. 447pp. Every effective story needs to have compelling characters. Most of those characters are the people whose stories are being told, but often, especially in film and television, the setting becomes an additional character, so central to the plot that it could not be exchanged for another location. Vienna is often cast as that type of location—an integral part of the story that deserves as much attention from viewers as the characters portrayed by actors. In his book, Screening Vienna, Timothy Conley has compiled a comprehensive list of movies and television productions set in Vienna and examines the ways that they depict the Central European capital. He shows that English-language filmmakers have made use of Vienna in many ways, nearly from the beginning of the history of film, and that the Vienna they depict has changed along with current events, often saying more about the way the English-speaking world felt about Austria at the time and less about the actual conditions in Vienna. Conley comes at this project from a unique position. He is an associate professor of English at Bradley University but has extensive experience in Vienna, both as a Fulbright scholar and as the director of his university’s study abroad program in the city. He has compiled an impressive filmography of media featuring Vienna, either as an actual filming location (sometimes standing in for other cities, such as Budapest or Moscow) or as the setting for a film made at a studio elsewhere. A Germanist or an Austrian historian might [End Page 188] have had different priorities when choosing what to focus on in this text, but his choices make a great deal of sense for someone who is looking at Vienna through the lens of English-language literature and media. The selections that American and British filmmakers have made when depicting the Austrian capital are as indicative of the cultural biases of Anglophones as they are of actual trends in Viennese life. As Conley notes, these representations are often highly romanticized, especially when the subject is the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At other times, Vienna is portrayed as a sinister place, particularly in films set during the war or in the immediate postwar period. Conley notes that he initially believed that Vienna’s depiction would be darker in films produced in the second half of the twentieth century, but that was not the case. In reality, whether the city was a romantic or menacing place depended more on the genre of the film than on the year of the production. Films that focused on the Empire or romance continued to depict the city as a happy, gemütlich place, whereas those that dealt with political or military themes had a darker view of Vienna. The book is organized into chapters based on the subject matter of the films and television shows included, starting with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and including subjects from science and medicine to composers (a whole chapter is dedicated to filmic depictions of the Strauss family). I found the chapter on immigrants and foreigners in Vienna to be particularly interesting, mostly because there are so few examples of films or television productions that depict the lives of immigrants to Vienna. Considering that Vienna is a major center of migration today, it is a shame that there are not more English-language films that focus on this important topic. In some respects, Screening Vienna is covering territory that other scholars have also investigated. Conley himself acknowledges four texts, two in German and two in English, as his most important secondary sources. The text that seems to have captured Conley’s imagination the most was Robert Dassanowsky’s 2012 book World Film Locations: Vienna. He quotes from the seven essays included in that text and his organization aligns roughly with the themes of these seven essays, but Conley only uses that as a springboard for a larger project. Conley’s text is...

The cultural and economic implications of UK/European co-production

As research on transnational cinema makes clear, films do not easily coincide with national borders, but ‘link people or institutions across nations’. While Britain’s strongest transnational links are with the US, it has also developed production partnerships with its European neighbours. Each year, British film companies lead-produce about 15 co-productions with other Europeans. But why do British filmmakers work with European partners, and what are the implications of these partnerships for their film’s cultural identity and its box office performance? Through analysing a sample of recent UK/European co-productions, this article suggests most British film companies work with other Europeans for financial rather than creative reasons. At the same time, UK/European co-productions are more ‘culturally European’ than other categories of British film (i.e. domestic and inward investment features). While this does not necessarily boost their popularity with European audiences, the bigger budgets and better distribution links which co-production enables means UK/European co-productions on average perform better in Europe than UK domestic features. Co-production is therefore a useful strategy for getting British films made and circulated within Europe, though this strategy is also thwarted by a UK film policy orientated towards attracting higher value US inward investment features.

Experimental Film and Architectural Critique in the Works of British Avant-Garde Filmmakers

ABSTRACTThis article examines the aesthetics of experimental film as a medium for architectural critique with reference to the urban films of three contemporary British avant-garde filmmakers: Patrick Keiller, William Raban and John Smith. It argues that the aesthetics of experimental film, dependent on the employment of certain cinematic techniques, such as montage, mediate visuality beyond the focused perspectival vision to create critical mediations of contemporary global urbanisms.

Seeing the Other: the Depiction of China in British Documentary Films

The Western world has been contemplating China since the early times of Marco Polo. Recent and former researchers have approached East-West relationships and much attention has been paid to the Western portrayal of the country. However, little has been said about how Chinese culture has traditionally been depicted in audiovisual media and analysis of the images of China in documentary films is particularly scarce. From the first Attack on a China Mission (1900) to The dying rooms (1995), British filmmakers have portrayed China in many different ways. The aim of this paper is to outline general patterns of representation in documentary films on China produced in the UK, looking at some of the most outstanding films of the century. We find that positive and negative images of the country and the people have successively been on the screens and that the balance between them has traditionally depended more on international relationships between China and the UK, than on China’s reality itself. Access to information and changes in the documentary production sector have proved to be determining too. More than ever before, our understanding of China is of crucial importance today, and the results of this paper show how media practices can either hinder or smooth the path to mutual comprehension.

The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

The lightning cartoon: Animation from music hall to cinema

This article examines the history of the lightning cartoon act, which rose to prominence in British music halls in the 1880s, continued in popularity into the early twentieth century, and played a key role in the development of animation, the act having been performed by a number of important figures in its early history, including J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay in the US, George Méliès in France, and Walter Booth in the UK. This paper considers the ways in which this act anticipated animation, featuring qualities such as transformation, the movement of line drawings, and the desire to bring drawings to life. It also examines the perceptual play that was central to the act’s aesthetic and which continued into early films of lightning cartoonists performing, as stage performers such as Tom Merry and Walter Booth transferred and played an important role in early British filmmaking.