British Cinema and a Divided Nation PDF Download

Author: John White
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474481038
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Offers contemporary context of Britain as a deeply divided society as reflected in film.

Author: Jeffrey Richards
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719047435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book seeks to examine the ways in which the cinema has defined, mythified and disseminated British national identity during the course of the twentieth century. It takes the form of a series of linked essays which examine chronologically, thematically and by specific case studies of films, stars and genres the complexities and ambiguities in the process of evolution and definition of the national identity. It argues for the creation of a distinctive British national identity both in cinema and the wider culture. But it also assesses the creation of alternative identities both ethnic and regional and examines the interaction of cinema and other cultural forms (music, literature and television).

Author: Neil Archer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350104493
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Neil Archer's original study makes a timely and politically-engaged intervention in debates about national cinema and national identity. Structured around key examples of 'culturally English cinema' in the years up to and following the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Cinema and Brexit looks to make sense of the peculiarities and paradoxes marking this era of filmmaking. At the same time as providing a contextual and analytical reading of 21st century filmmaking in Britain, Archer raises critical questions about popular national cinema, and how Brexit has cast both light and shadow over this body of films. Central to Archer's argument is the idea that Brexit represents not just a critical moment in how we will understand future film production, but also in how we will understand production of the recent past. Using as a point of departure the London Olympics opening ceremony of 2012, Cinema and Brexit considers the tensions inherent in a wide range of films, including Skyfall (2012), Dunkirk (2017), Their Finest (2017), Darkest Hour (2017), The Crown (Netflix, 2016), Paddington (2014), Paddington 2 (2017), Never Let Me Go (2011), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), The Trip (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), The World's End (2013), Sightseers (2012), One Day (2011), Attack the Block (2011), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and The Kid Who Would be King (2019). Archer examines the complex national narratives and representations these films expound, situating his analyses within the broader commercial contexts of film production beyond Hollywood, highlighting the negotiations or contradictions at play between the industrial imperatives of contemporary films and the varied circumstances in which they are made. Considering some of the ways a popular and globally-minded English cinema is finding means to work alongside and through the contexts of Brexit, he questions what are the stakes for, and possibilities of, a global 'culturally English cinema' in 2019 and beyond.

Author: Gábor Gergely
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000512290
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

Author: Homer B. Pettey
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438471130
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British. Winner of the 2019 SAMLA Studies Book Award for Edited Collections presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Rule, Britannia! surveys the British biopic, a genre crucial to understanding how national cinema engages with the collective experience and values of its intended audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how screen biographies of prominent figures in British history and culture can be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity. The contributors engage with the vexed concept of British nationality, especially as this sense of collective belonging is problematized by the ethnically oriented alternatives of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nations. They explore the critical and historiographical issues raised by the biopic, demonstrating that celebration of conventional virtue is not the genre’s only natural subject. Filmic depictions of such personalities as Elizabeth I, Victoria, George VI, Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch, and Jack the Ripper are covered. Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. His books include Film Noir and International Noir, both coedited with Palmer. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of the World Cinema program at Clemson University. His books include Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity (coedited with William H. Epstein); Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor (coedited with David Boyd); and Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze (coedited with Pettey and Steven M. Sanders), all published by SUNY Press.

Author: Jan G. Swynnoe
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780851158624
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
A study of the British contribution to film music, detailing the idiosyncracies of British film, and showing how the differences between it and Hollywood affected composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Jan Swynnoe's study is concerned with the special British contribution to film music, detailing how the idiosyncracies of British film, and of the British character, set it apart from its Hollywood counterpart. She shows how the differences between the two industries in all aspects of film making variously affected composers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the mid 1930s, when film composers in America were perfecting the formulae of the classical Hollywood score, film music in Britain scarcely existed; within a year or so, however, top British composers were scoring British films. How this transformation was brought about, and how established British concert composers, including Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax, faced the challenge of the exacting and often bewildering art of scoring for feature film, is vividly described here, and the resulting scores compared with the work of seasoned Hollywood composers. JAN SWYNNOE researched the material on which her book is based over several years, at the same time pursuing her musical life as pianist, percussionist and composer.

Author: Stephen Glynn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030742105
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of the sport of boxing as depicted in British film. Through close textual analysis, production and reception histories and readings that establish social, cultural and political contexts, the book explores the ways in which prizefighters, amateur boxers, managers and supporters (from Regency gentry to East End gangsters) are represented on the British screen. Exploring a complex and controversial sport, it addresses not only the pain-versus-reward dilemma that boxing necessarily engenders, but also the frequently censorious attitude of those in authority, with boxing’s social development facilitating a wider study around issues of class, gender and race, latterly contesting the whole notion of ‘Britishness’. Varying in scope from Northern circuit comedies to London-based ‘ladsploitation’ films, from auteur entries by Alfred Hitchcock to programme fillers by E.J. Fancey, the boxing film also serves as a prism through which one can trace major historical shifts in the British film industry.

Author: I.Q. Hunter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315392178
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Over 39 chapters The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History offers a comprehensive and revisionist overview of British cinema as, on the one hand, a commercial entertainment industry and, on the other, a series of institutions centred on economics, funding and relations to government. Whereas most histories of British cinema focus on directors, stars, genres and themes, this Companion explores the forces enabling and constraining the films’ production, distribution, exhibition, and reception contexts from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors provide a wealth of empirical and archive-based scholarship that draws on insider perspectives of key film institutions and illuminates aspects of British film culture that have been neglected or marginalized, such as the watch committee system, the Eady Levy, the rise of the multiplex and film festivals. It also places emphasis on areas where scholarship has either been especially productive and influential, such as in early and silent cinema, or promoted new approaches, such as audience and memory studies.

Author: Stephen Glynn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030051803
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of horseracing in British cinema. Through comprehensive contextual histories of film production and reception, together with detailed textual analysis, this book explores the aesthetic and emotive power of the enduringly popular horseracing genre, its ideologically-inflected landscape and the ways in which horse owners and riders, bookmakers and punters have been represented on British screen. The films discussed span from the 1890s to the present day and include silent shorts, quota quickies and big-budget biopics. A work of social and film history, The British Horseracing Film demonstrates how the so-called “sport of kings” functions as an accessible institutional structure through which to explore cinematic discussions about the British nation—but also, and equally, national approaches to British cinema.

Author: James D. Stone
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476625565
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
 As the British watched their empire crumble and the United States became the dominant world power, many British films warned of the dangers posed by American culture. Americans were frequently portrayed as disconcertingly ambitious, reckless and irreverent. Yet the same films that depicted the U.S. as an agent of chaos also suggested Britons might do well to embrace American-style energy and egalitarianism. Movies like Love Actually, The Quatermass Xperiment, 28 Weeks Later, Local Hero and Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent have delved into the storied “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K. These films and many more examined in this first book-length study of British movies about America, reveal much about British attitudes regarding power, gender, class, sexuality and emotion.