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The introductory chapter is written to help position the reader regarding the academic climate that saw the first edition of Hammer and Beyond materialise, to consider some of the book’s omissions, and to assess the state of British horror in the years immediately leading up to, and following, its publication.
cinema and society in the last twenty years will also be considered. From acting and scriptwriting to directing Serreau’s early career is typical of many of her female contemporaries. Although a few older female filmmakers (such as Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras and Nelly Kaplan) managed to make films in the 1960s (even late 1950s for Varda), most of the baby boomers became directors only in the 1970s. They often started with acting and felt, as numerous actresses did at the time, either a growing frustration with the roles
– La mala educación and Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces, 2009 ) – which blur distinctions between past–present and fact–fiction, it is not surprising that Volver (encouraged by Almodóvar’s production notes and marketing materials) prompted reviewers to focus on the film’s local colour and its autobiographical dimension, aspects that mask the film’s engagement with the silencing of the past, the ramifications of unaddressed trauma, and the specularisation of girls and women in cinema and society in general. Volver employs mother–daughter relationships
Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a filmmaker, no full-length study of Henri-Georges Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a re-evaluation of Clouzot's achievements, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les Diaboliques, Le Mystère Picasso). Clouzot's films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although they are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his knows the art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, and the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment.
how they were received by popular contemporary magazines such as Picturegoer and Picture Show, and what trade papers like Kinematograph Weekly and Today’s Cinema made of them. These might be thought to have had their fingers on the pulse of what was likely to appeal to large, receptive audiences. Notes 1 For example, Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, London: University of California Press, 1977; Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989; Charles Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
. Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949 (London: Routledge, 1992) , p. 34; A. Davies, ‘A Cinema in Between: Postwar British Cinema’, in A. Davies and A. Sinfield (eds) British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945–1999 (London: Routledge, 2000) , pp. 110–124, at p. 111. 9 M. Sweet, Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 5. 10 Deborah Sugg Ryan’s analysis of ‘suburban modernism’ and Judy Giles’ exploration of domestic modernity and the suburbs
(London: BFI, 1992), p. 142. 6 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–49 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 113. 7 Squadron Leader Ken Cater MBE (retd) (personal communication). 8
event’ of quite extraordinary prominence and duration, and time and again the trade press 5 6 Cinemas and cinemagoing in wartime Britain, 1939–45 contained reports of attendances fluctuating in response to events as dramatic as the blackout or the blitz, or as prosaic as the changing of the clocks or the seasons. This book will explore the interconnectedness of cinema and society in Britain during the Second World War not only in terms of the impact that the war had on British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945, but also in terms of how the cinema