The British Working Class in Postwar Film PDF Download

Author: Philip Gillett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719062582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Using a sociological model, The British Working Class in Postwar Film looks at how working-class people are portrayed in British feature films from the decade after World War II. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With an interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Readers are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields.

Author: Philip Gillett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526141809
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
An incidental pleasure of watching a film is what it tells us about the society in which it is made. Using a sociological model, The British working class in postwar film looks at how working-class people were portrayed in British feature films in the decade after the Second World War. Though some of the films examined are well known, others have been forgotten and deserve reassessment. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Students of media and cultural studies are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields. This work should appeal to all readers interested in social history and in how cinema and society works.

Author: Margaret Willes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030018784X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played—and continues to play—an integral role in everyday British life.

Author: Paul Embery
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509540008
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
The typical contemporary Labour MP is almost certain to be a university-educated Europhile who is more comfortable in the leafy enclaves of north London than the party’s historic heartlands. As a result, Labour has become radically out of step with the culture and values of working-class Britain. Drawing on his background as a firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham, Paul Embery argues that this disconnect has been inevitable since the Left political establishment swallowed a poisonous brew of economic and social liberalism. They have come to despise traditional working-class values of patriotism, family and faith and instead embraced globalisation, rapid demographic change and a toxic, divisive brand of identity politics. Embery contends that the Left can only revive if it speaks once again to the priorities of working-class people by combining socialist economics with the cultural politics of belonging, place and community. No one who wants to really understand why our politics has become so dysfunctional and what the Left can do to fix it can afford to miss this authentic, insightful and passionate book.

Author: John Hill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118477510
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
A stimulating overview of the intellectual arguments and critical debates involved in the study of British and Irish cinemas British and Irish film studies have expanded in scope and depth in recent years, prompting a growing number of critical debates on how these cinemas are analysed, contextualized, and understood. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema addresses arguments surrounding film historiography, methods of textual analysis, critical judgments, and the social and economic contexts that are central to the study of these cinemas. Twenty-nine essays from many of the most prominent writers in the field examine how British and Irish cinema have been discussed, the concepts and methods used to interpret and understand British and Irish films, and the defining issues and debates at the heart of British and Irish cinema studies. Offering a broad scope of commentary, the Companion explores historical, cultural and aesthetic questions that encompass over a century of British and Irish film studies—from the early years of the silent era to the present-day. Divided into five sections, the Companion discusses the social and cultural forces shaping British and Irish cinema during different periods, the contexts in which films are produced, distributed and exhibited, the genres and styles that have been adopted by British and Irish films, issues of representation and identity, and debates on concepts of national cinema at a time when ideas of what constitutes both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ cinema are under question. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema is a valuable and timely resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of film, media, and cultural studies, and for those seeking contemporary commentary on the cinemas of Britain and Ireland.

Author: Christine Geraghty
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415171571
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This text explores some of the key debates about British cinema and film theory, and examines the curious mix of rebellion and conformity which marked British cinema in the post-war era.

Author: Geoffrey G. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191623555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first scholarly history of the British working class in the Second World War. It integrates social, political, and labour history, and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities. Geoffrey Field examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities, and the nation. Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, the records of trade unions and numerous other institutions, Blood, Sweat, and Toil traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their aspirations and their social and political attitudes. Previous studies of the Home Front have analysed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, Field argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was 'remade', achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. Employing a contingent, non-teleological conception of class identity and indicating the plural and shifting mix of factors that contributed to workers' social consciousness, he criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society.

Author: Philip Gillett
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527534502
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Films are not just for audiences: historians of the twentieth century have much to learn from them. A film exposes the attitudes and unconsidered trifles that people took for granted and which were not considered worth recording elsewhere. This volume surveys British cinema from the final days of the Second World War to the early 1970s, exploring societal change across a range of topics including housing, the countryside, psychiatry and the law. This provides a basis for cross-cultural comparisons, with many issues deserving of further research being highlighted. The films discussed range from the well-known Odd Man Out to the forgotten It’s Hard to be Good.

Author: B. F. Taylor
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781847791931
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. By eschewing the usual tendency to view films like A Kind of Loving and The Entertainer collectively and include them in broader debates about class, gender, and ideology, this book presents a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films. For each film, a re-distribution of existing critical emphasis also allows the problematic relationship between these films and the question of realism to be reconsidered. Drawing upon existing sources and returning to long-standing and unchallenged assumptions about these films, this book offers the opportunity for the reader to return to the British New Wave and decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the films.

Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307555364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.