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. I teach film studies at the University of Hull. I have written on British film for the Quarterly Review of Film and Video , the Journal of Popular British Cinema and the Journal of Gender Studies and I am currently completing a doctorate on the representation of women in the 1950s films of J. Lee Thompson. This interest sprang from spending countless afternoons watching
extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. Given the shifts in attitudes over the past thirty years – in society generally as well as in the little world of film studies – one might expect the judgments expressed there, the choices of what is important, to have become dated and irrelevant. If one reads Roy Armes’s A Critical History of British Cinema
extension, the virtue of the monarchy as institution – provided, the film suggests, individual monarchs undertake the role with the commitment and duty entrusted in them. MELODRAMA, FILM STUDIES AND THE MONARCHY BIOPIC I primarily use the term melodrama with Brooks’s sense of it as ‘an imaginative mode’, a way of seeing and conveying moral truths rather than a stage or screen genre with a clear
Film Studies has to date paid too little attention to the role cultural institutions play in the transformation of cinema history into heritage. At the dawn of cinema’s second century, a range of organisational bodies – including museums and art galleries, the publicity and promotion industries, film journalism and publishing, as well as the academy – work to activate and commodify memory narratives
proliferation of courses in film studies and media studies, the funding of access to the source materials has not increased at all . There can be surprisingly simple misunderstandings about what a film archive is. People who understand perfectly that they can’t walk in and browse around manuscript collections of the British Library are illogically outraged when a film archive refuses them access to original
, Antonioni, Resnais, Godard, Fellini, Buñuel and Visconti, it was clear that, for the critical intelligentsia in Britain, Losey seemed the only director who was capable of producing comparable work. Evidence of that attitude could be seen in the proliferation of critical monographs on directors that came out in the 1960s, as a result, no doubt, of the growth of film studies as an academic subject and the
: Women in American Films of the Fifties (Ungar, 1978). I teach film studies at the University of Hull. I have written on British film for the Quarterly Review of Film and Video , the Journal of Popular British Cinema and the Journal of Gender Studies and I am currently completing a doctorate on the
both media, whilst at the same time challenging staging and filming orthodoxies. Against this, there is now a revisionist history (currently stronger in film studies than in theatre studies, though perhaps not for much longer) that has sought to re-evaluate hitherto marginalised genres, texts and practitioners. In film history, this is evident in the recent interest in melodrama and fantasy shown by Pam Cook and others
much the same filmmaker that he was at the beginning of his career, when those feelings in him were conditioned by the experiences of the 1960s. As the Snowden project demonstrates, they continue to inform his cinema to the present day, but aesthetics have undoubtedly shifted. By utilising many of the typical forms and functions of film studies, engaging along the way with notable theories, critical discourse, historical analysis and methodology, we seek to show how and why that changing artistic appreciation is essential to understanding not just the second phase of
Bernhardt’s acting. (Jay Leyda and Andre Bazin are also critical of her theatricality.) My point is that ‘filmed theatre’ has long been used as a term of critique in film studies. 9 See, for example, Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town , p. 316. See also Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Romancing the Queen’, in The