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everywhere the newer post-war cinemas offered comparative or indeed greater luxury than the best live theatres. Increasingly, middle-class patrons were to be found going to the newer cinemas; the existence of a clientele of similar social standing was important in fostering the cinema-going habit. There was not universal approval for this new cultural trend. In 1919 the Editor of The Play Pictorial visited several cinemas and
Epstein was in eclipse (1945–80). Or, to put it another way, Epstein’s cinema and his philosophy of the cinema have, according to Deleuze’s tacit proposal, become subsumed within post-war films as their latent principle of composition. Hence, when Deleuze defines the time–image of post-war cinema, his formulation appears to describe Madeline’s animated portrait in La Chute de la maison Usher (to which he refers elsewhere in the Cinema books): A two-sided image, actual and virtual is formed. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photograph, a postcard, came to life
. Referring to post-war cinema, the film historian Jill Forbes (1992: 171) suggests that ‘the output of [comedy] directors and actors is often vulgar, formulaic and repetitive’ and ‘of less interest than other genres when examining how the cinema has developed’. Grassin and Sender ( 2011 : 12) also identify trends that contribute to the perception that comedy is a less cinematic genre, whose success is due to
philosophy, Gilles Deleuze formalised a seismic change in cinematic space, perception and subjectivity in terms of the transformation of the ‘image-movement’ of silent and classical cinema, marked by an aesthetics of action and movement, into the ‘image-temps’ of modern (essentially post-war) cinema. ‘Duration’ (‘la durée’) – which Deleuze, following Bergson, saw as immanent to the universe – took over ‘action’, for cinema could no longer relay completed events (the result in large part of the crisis in representation following the Holocaust). The ‘event’ is now always in
addition to the known facts of the attack and fates of the craft) and the beginning of the survivors’ journey to imprisonment. From the re-invocation of national peril in its first sequence, to the resigned acceptance of personal loss in the achievement of a higher goal in its last, Above Us the Waves registers a regret for the exigencies of the war comparable to The Dam Busters, and quite antithetical to the post-war cinema’s supposed celebration of victory. TNWC02 16/11/06 11:27 AM Page 58 58 Post-war British naval films and the service comedy The film’s muted
’s La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (1960). Hammer films, which have been included in accounts of British cinema more often than other unstable genres, and, to a lesser extent, the Italian western, which I discuss briefly in Chapter 1, are possibly the only exceptions among European and North American post-war cinemas. But as the contrasting positions of film critics and historians reproduced above show, even Hammer productions began to acquire some degree of (contested) legitimacy within and as part of British cinema only from the
discovery, developing things as they ‘go along’, unconstrained by a script. In tune with Rossellini’s post-war cinema and anticipating the nouvelles vagues of the 1960s, Zavattini celebrated the supremacy of filming over plot and the immediacy of an unprogrammatic encounter between artist and materials. He contrasted the layered and flexible structures of diaries, of subjective, autobiographical journeys truly
([1943b]). Significantly, the actor most frequently associated with these qualities is the darling of official post-war cinema and the embodiment of the values of the recently established military dictatorship: Alfredo Mayo (Mas-Guindal [1943b] and [1943c]). Nevertheless, such calls went unheeded during this period. Neither official cultural organisations nor producers showed any interest in formalising actor training during the first half of the 1940s as Hollywood had since the mid-1930s (Baron, 1999). The screen acting school in which A. Abad Ojuel sought to
“lechée”’ 16 (Truffaut 1987 : 220) of the tradition de qualité determine conservatism of meaning; the ‘realism’ of left-wing directors such as Autant-Lara he reduces to ‘donne[r] au public sa dose habituelle de noirceur, de non-conformisme, de facile audace’ 17 (Truffaut 1987 : 221). The true ‘audacities’ of post-war cinema are performed by those ‘men of the cinema’ who experiment with the medium
widespread adoption of a documentary film aesthetic in both British and American feature production during World War II. The recollection and reconstruction of recent events in naval wartime TNWD01 16/11/06 212 11:26 AM Page 212 Conclusion productions anticipates the documentary approach to history in nostalgic and reverential productions (The Dam Busters; Michael Anderson, 1954; The Longest Day; Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, 1962) in the post-war period. However, rather than simply setting an agenda or a tone which is developed in post-war cinema