Reviewed by: English Filming, English Writing Linda DeLibero (bio) Jefferson Hunter, English Filming, English Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 357 pp. Has any national cinema in the annals of film scholarship suffered such conspicuous neglect as England’s? Cinephiles may enthusiastically cite the distinctive approaches of any number of particular directors who’ve plied their trade in the UK, from Michael Powell’s sensuous expressionism [End Page 138] to the down and dirty realism of Mike Leigh. But in the collective mind, English film is the stodgy spinster who plays second fiddle to her sexier Continental cousins in Italy and France. Much of this odd disconnect stems from film’s often vexed relationship with writing, an issue that looms large in a country whose artistic legacy rests on its literature and its theatre. Having hogged the cultural spotlight, the written word leaves to those “lesser” arts, cinema and TV, little but the task of churning out pallid but popular adaptations of Dickens and Shakespeare for the masses. Indeed, François Truffaut once tartly remarked to Alfred Hitchcock that there was a “certain incompatibility between the words ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain.’” Doubtless he had in mind the “certaine tendance” he and his cohorts at Cahiers du Cinema scornfully noted in their own country’s filmic heritage, the “tradition of quality” that produced bloated, static adaptations of literary masterworks, betraying, as they saw it, the very nature of cinema as a visual medium. That last point is crucial, for it goes a long way toward explaining why even the leading figures in Britain’s own influential tradition of film scholarship have, until quite recently, mostly ignored their fellow countrymen’s output. Legitimizing the new discipline of film studies meant defining cinema against the other arts, valorizing its visual properties above all else. In other words, the gold standard becomes pure cinema, and the impure becomes, say, a cinema uniquely beholden to literary and theatrical adaptation, to words. British film’s reputation as a national cinema unworthy of scrutiny has everything to do with its logocentric tendencies, as if cinema rooted in writing couldn’t have a fascinating and expressive visual language of its own. In fact, the fusion of the literary and the pictorial is precisely what characterizes British film, what marks it off from other national cinemas and makes the study of its history and aesthetics singularly fascinating. This contention is at the heart of Jefferson Hunter’s engaging new book, English Filming, English Writing, a highly persuasive and necessary challenge to both the notion that the relationship between writing and film must be adversarial and that English film is somehow uncinematic. Hunter, a professor of English and film studies at Smith College, unravels the word/image dichotomy by tracing the intricate, often unnoticed relationships between filmmakers and the texts that inspire them—the resonances, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, between contemporaneous texts and films, and the visual tropes that echo their literary antecedents. Reminding us that literature itself is often stunningly cinematic, and that great films can be enriched by language without sacrificing visual lyricism, Hunter makes the case that English film is inextricably bound up with the nation’s literary heritage. And each art, he argues, both depends on and helps define the meaning of Englishness itself. Deploying an intrepid researcher’s termite skills along with a fine eye for formal visual analysis, Hunter seeks nothing less than to uncover the “elemental qualities of English culture—its distinctive regard for the past, [End Page 139] the pleasure it takes in continuities and reworkings . . . its talent for collaborations, and especially the complex interrelatedness, in the twentieth century, of its major forms of expression.” Granted, defining what is “elemental” about the English character (and Hunter uses the designation “English” consciously, as the book addresses neither Scottish nor Irish film) can be as elusive as proving the influence of terroir on wine. Is there such a thing? The concept is a bit of a sticky wicket, but Hunter (an American) makes a go of it. Delving into a series of little-explored but fascinating histories in three of his chapters—on World War II English pageantry, British crime films, and the uses of...
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Jul 20, 2022
George Kouvaros 
Open Access
