British Image In British Cinema

[jpro]

Hi all



I'm writing an essay for next week with the title...



"How has Britain been represented to the world through British cinema?�



I've got little time to research this one so i will be grateful for some of your thoughts and opinion on this subject. I think there's clear contrast in how Brit as been represented from film to film depending on the genre... romcoms generally concentrate on... well... the romantic view of posh bumbling Brits set along side our beautiful landscape... cue Hugh Grant! Then there is the social dramas that are gritty, dark but cool... cue Michael Cane. However, i have suspicions that the origin of funding (i.e. US) has a big influence in how Britain is represented in these films.



Please give me you opinions on this, tell me how you think the British image has changed since the 30's and 40's when British Cinema ruled... also please tell me how i can found out where and how British films are funded.



Cheers to you all



Jpro

[sanndevil]

Originally posted by jpro@May 4 2005, 10:18 AM

Hi all



I'm writing an essay for next week with the title...



"How has Britain been represented to the world through British cinema?”



I've got little time to research this one so i will be grateful for some of your thoughts and opinion on this subject. I think there's clear contrast in how Brit as been represented from film to film depending on the genre... romcoms generally concentrate on... well... the romantic view of posh bumbling Brits set along side our beautiful landscape... cue Hugh Grant! Then there is the social dramas that are gritty, dark but cool... cue Michael Cane. However, i have suspicions that the origin of funding (i.e. US) has a big influence in how Britain is represented in these films.



Please give me you opinions on this, tell me how you think the British image has changed since the 30's and 40's when British Cinema ruled... also please tell me how i can found out where and how British films are funded.



Cheers to you all



Jpro

Hi Jpro and welcome to the forum. I hope you get much enjoyment out of it.



I have just completed a post grad Masters in Film Studies and covered the territory of your essay. I'm more than happy to send you a bibliography as long as your arm if it will help you, although you haven't indicated at what level your research is pitched.



Cheers

Nigel

[jpro]

Hi sanndevil



i'm a final year undergraduate student. it will be great if you can send me your bibliography.



cheers



jpro

[sanndevil]

ok - here we go. If you don't fancy much in the way of leg work, the top book is probably very close to your terms of reference anyway!



Richards, Jeffrey, Films and British National Identity, (Manchester University Press, 1997)



Street, Sarah, British National Cinema, (Routledge, 1997)



Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror For England, (Praeger, 1971)



Higson, Andrew, “Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film� in Higson, Andrew (ed), Dissolving Views, (Continuum, 1996)



Hunt, Leon, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, (Routledge, 1998)



Lay, Samantha, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit, (Wallflower, 2002)



Lowenstein, Adam, “Peeping Tom and the New Wave� in Ashby, Justine (ed) & Higson, Andrew (ed), British Cinema, Past and Present, (Routledge, 2000)



Murphy, Robert, Sixties British Cinema, (BFI, 1992)



Trevelyan, John, What the Censor Saw, (Michael Joseph, 1973)



Walker, Alexander, Hollywood England, (Michael Joseph, 1974)



Geraghty, Christine. British Cinema in the Fifties. (Routledge, 2000)



Harper, Sue. Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film. (BFI, 1994)



Harper, Sue and Vincent Porter. “Cinema audience tastes in 1950s Britain�, Journal of Popular British Cinema, No. 2.

Street, S. British Cinema in Documents. (Routledge, 2000).



Hill, John, Sex, Class and Realism, (BFI, 1986, 1997)



Porter, Vincent, “Between Structure and History: Genre in Popular British Cinema�, Journal of Popular British Cinema #1 (1998)



Porter, Vincent, “Methodism versus the Market-place: The Rank Organisation and British Cinema�, The British Cinema Book, (BFI, 1997)



Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England, (Pubs Overstock, 1986)



Barker, Sir Ernest, The Character of England, (Oxford, 1947)



Hearn, Marcus & Barnes, Alan, The Hammer Story, (Titan, 1998)



Higson, Andrew, “A Diversity of Film Practices: Renewing British Cinema in the 1970s�, in Moore-Gilbert, B.J. (ed), The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure?, (Routledge, 1993)



Jordan, Marion, “Carry On…Follow That Stereotype� in Curran, James and Porter, Vincent (eds), British Cinema History, (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1983)



Medhurst, Andy, “Carry On Camp� in Sight and Sound, (Volume 2, Issue 4, 1992)



Orwell, George, “The Art of Donald McGill� in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, (Penguin, 1965)



Marwick, Arthur, British Society since 1944 (Fourth Edition), (Penguin, 2003)



Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy, (Penguin, 1990 edition)



Walker, Alexander, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, (Harrap, 1985)

[Steve Crook]

But remember, if you only quote one source, that's plagarism.

If you quote two, that's research!



Steve

[Steve Crook]

Originally posted by sanndevil@May 5 2005, 01:43 AM

ok - here we go. If you don't fancy much in the way of leg work, the top book is probably very close to your terms of reference anyway!

I'm not sure about Alexander Walker, he was the one who was still calling Peeping Tom a "snuff film" in the 1997 documentary A Very British Psycho that's on the Criterion DVD.



The others are some great reading though.



Steve

[The_Late_Peter_Cook]

Originally posted by sanndevil@May 5 2005, 12:43 AM

Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror For England, (Praeger, 1971)

Fantastic book, sadly out of print.



I'd have included Charles Barr's 'Earling Studios' and Robert Murphy's 'Realism And Tinsel' on that list. Also Robert Lewis deals a lot with the British character in 'The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers' and his mongraph on Charles Hawtrey (his style is an aquired taste, and people tend to love him or hate him, but he raises a lot interesting points about performance.)

[dylan]

A few more:



Aldgate, A & Richards J. BEST OF BRITISH. (I.B. Tauris, 1999)



Drazin, C. IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD MAN. (Methuen, 2000).



Drazin, C. KORDA. (Sedgwick & Jackson, 2002)



Richards, J. (ed) THE UNKNOWN 1930s. (I.B.Tauris, 2000)

[jpro]

Cheers for the list, Sanndevil



i'm going to check at uni for them tonight. The Third Man has rated as the top British film of the C20, I'm going to try and watch it tomorrow. Why is your favourite film? Any how do you think Britain is represented?

[jpro]

Actually, i suppose it would be difficult to see how britain is represented in The Third Man because its set in Vienna. Bloody Hell!

[The_Late_Peter_Cook]

Originally posted by jpro@May 6 2005, 04:22 PM

Actually, i suppose it would be difficult to see how britain is represented in The Third Man because its set in Vienna. Bloody Hell!

But Harry Lime's the ultimate Spiv...

[Steve Crook]

@May 5 2005, 01:43 AM

Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror For England, (Praeger, 1971)

Well worth hunting for. Durgnat was a great writer (and one of the few to mention Powell & Pressburger in the early 1970s) but he did tend to see everything (and I mean everything) in terms of the class struggle.



But anyone who can invent a phrase like "Powell's colour by pyrotechnicolor" is all right by me.



Steve

[dylan]

Originally posted by jpro@May 6 2005, 04:22 PM

Actually, i suppose it would be difficult to see how britain is represented in The Third Man because its set in Vienna. Bloody Hell!

Drazin's book show's how an essentially British view of post-war Europe in Greene's story was altered to appease the American backers resulting in significantly different version shown in the US. The book also provides a good background on the British film industry of the period and the American involvement. For the purposes of the essay it is worth citing as a depiction of British involvement in the post-war occupation of Europe - and mentioning that Harry Lime was English in Greene's story. Similarly, films showing British colonial rule are worth examining.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by SteveCrook@May 5 2005, 05:15 PM

I'm not sure about Alexander Walker, he was the one who was still calling Peeping Tom a "snuff film" in the 1997 documentary A Very British Psycho that's on the Criterion DVD.



The others are some great reading though.



Steve

Walker had some extremely eccentric opinions when it came to the actual content of films (a slight understatement), but his analysis of the historical/financial backdrop is usually spot on, and I can thoroughly recommend his first two British film history books (I haven't read the third).



He was one of the first people to point out the massive flaws inherent in the late 1990s combination of Lottery funding and tax breaks (in a nutshell, too many crap films chasing too few distributors), and although he did tend to bang on about it obsessively in his regular Evening Standard column, hindsight suggests that he was broadly right.



The great thing about Walker was that he wasn't afraid to be contrary and combative - he got a lot of people's backs up, but if that meant that important questions got asked (and even answered), that was all to the good. And the genuine affection that a great many ostensible enemies showed towards him after he died said it all.

[The_Late_Peter_Cook]

Well worth hunting for. Durgnat was a great writer (and one of the few to mention Powell & Pressburger in the early 1970s) but he did tend to see everything (and I mean everything) in terms of the class struggle.



But anyone who can invent a phrase like "Powell's colour by pyrotechnicolor" is all right by me.



Steve

One of the great things about Durgnat's book, was that he tended to take subjects that were largely ignored at that time, like P&P and genres such as horror, seriously.



I fond it in my university libray, around ten years ago and read it two or three times that year. It's a real shame that it has been left out-of-print for so long. In fact I'm suprised that no publisher hasn't snapped it up, considering it's such a key book.

[DB7]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@May 7 2005, 09:56 AM

The great thing about Walker was that he wasn't afraid to be contrary and combative -

Or just plain senile. His diatribe at Fight Club and many other modern films was more OTT than the majority of Mary Whitehouse's outbursts. His judgement of British film was similarly flawed and ignoring distribution difficulties judged solely on box-office takings; which if applied to Men in Black makes it a cinematic masterpiece.

[Steve Crook]

Originally posted by DB7@May 7 2005, 11:59 AM

Or just plain senile. His diatribe at Fight Club and many other modern films was more OTT than the majority of Mary Whitehouse's outbursts. His judgement of British film was similarly flawed and ignoring distribution difficulties judged solely on box-office takings; which if applied to Men in Black makes it a cinematic masterpiece.

I think he discovered senility at quite a young age.



Steve

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by DB7@May 7 2005, 11:59 AM

Or just plain senile. His diatribe at Fight Club and many other modern films was more OTT than the majority of Mary Whitehouse's outbursts. His judgement of British film was similarly flawed and ignoring distribution difficulties judged solely on box-office takings; which if applied to Men in Black makes it a cinematic masterpiece.

I don't have copies to hand to check, but I distinctly recall his reviews of Ratcatcher and Sixth Happiness giving the lie to that accusation. Both proved that he was quite happy to champion Lottery-backed films if he felt they were actually worth making - even if, as in both those cases, they clearly weren't going to set the box office alight.



But I think you're misrepresenting his main argument: he wasn't concerned so much with box office as with the fact that easy access to finance through the Lottery and tax-avoidance schemes meant that too many British filmmakers became financially irresponsible. They poured all their resources into production while skimping on the boring but nonetheless critical areas of development, distribution and marketing - which financiers didn't care about because all they were interested in was an efficient tax dodge that they could sell to their investors (who, likewise, couldn't care less if their money was going into a film or a widget factory).



Walker's concern was that because the need for box-office accountability was being lessened (or even eliminated), the amount of self-indulgent dreck being turned out by British filmmakers was going through the roof. And by "self-indulgent dreck", I don't mean navel-gazing arthouse product - I mean films that are squarely aimed at the commercial sector, but made by people who don't have the faintest idea about what the market is actually after, because they're too busy posing in Raybans pretending to be the next Tarantino.



You talk about "distribution difficulties", but in my experience if a film is any good to begin with, it will find a distributor with relatively little hassle - I spent several years working in this field and vividly recall the soul-destroying round of film market screenings where I'd have to watch fifty pieces of literally unreleasable shite in order to find one potentially marketable gem. Distribution is certainly a problem in Britain that urgently needs addressing, but it's inextricably linked with the fact that too many filmmakers simply aren't developing their projects properly before they pass the point of no return - they think two script drafts over six months is enough, whereas twenty drafts over six years is much more realistic.



Most critics of the British film industry assume our inability to produce decent films on a consistent basis is to do with lack of money. Walker's argument was that this is largely a red herring: the amount of money is much less important than whether or not it's sensibly apportioned and spent, and whether the people supervising the spending (or supplying the money in the first place) actually know what they're doing. It's not so much a question of "do they have the money?" as "do they deserve the money?" - and in the case of a worryingly high proportion of British filmmakers, the answer is an unambiguous "no".

[MikeStevenson]

Hello all,



I am new to the site and much like the chap who started the thread I am doing a dissertation on assumptions of British character by nono-British people who watch popular British cinema.



The person who posted the bibliography has been a help, I have already researched a fair few of these for my literature review, I was wondering if any of these specifically deal with more current trends in British cinema, particular over the last years, say post Notting Hill. Actually, anything on British character since the 1990s will be great as not much has changed, at leat in regards to the Richard Curtis style romcom, which my research will focus on.



Could you point me to any and all important texts on British character in British cinema since the 1990s, it would be greatly appreciated and with any luck should help me in my research.



Cheers,

Mike.