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This book explores the interactions of comedy and drama within a group of significant and influential films released during the decade of the 1990s. It examines a group of British films from this period which engage with economic and social issues in unusual and compelling ways.
. The chapter concludes with case studies of Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) and The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), two films invoking very different cultural traditions as possible activities for unemployed males and troubled communities in modern British society. Chapter 2 discusses a number of contemporary British films focusing upon the experiences of British-Asian and African
date. In a 1947 article called ‘Angles of Approach’ Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics. 11 On the role of film criticism, Anderson wrote: ‘It is the critic’s first duty (and in this sense we are all critics) to perceive the object of a film
This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. It includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. The book features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. A classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which deals extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. In a 1947 article called 'Angles of Approach' Lindsay Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics . The war films of the 1950s together constitute the assented-to record of the emotions and moral judgments called upon to set in order those disorderly events. The book also talks about the Festival of Britain, White Corridors, and four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history.
and film comedy, registers his contribution, as does Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (1991). There, Peter Greenaway speaks of admiring Gilliam and fellow Python Terry Jones for their anarchy and irreverence, 4 while Derek Jarman puts ‘glorious Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ’ on a very short list of British 1970s and 1980s films he would keep. 5 By
ethnic comedy-dramas with their work on Bhaji on the Beach (1994), and therefore it was fitting that the new century saw them produce belated follow-up films: Bend It Like Beckham (directed by Chadha) and Anita and Me (scripted by Syal). The near ten-year gap between their first and second British films tended to suggest, however, that the place of the ethnic comedy-drama within contemporary British film culture was by no
of high culture including prominent figures such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw from the literary world; Roger Fry and Augustus John from the fine arts; alongside John Maynard Keynes, Julian Huxley, and J. B. S. Haldane from the intellectual and scientific community. 14 The major animating principle of the Society was a keen interest in films coming from France, Germany and the Soviet Union which were radically different especially in terms of film style and technique from contemporary British films, and, perhaps a more important
conventions of the naval war film, The Enemy Below (Dick Powell, 1957) might appear as an obvious nominee. Its reduction of naval combat to a personalised struggle between a U-boat commander (Curt Jurgens) and the captain of an American destroyer escort (Robert Mitchum) produces an even-handed, unsentimental but still idealised representation of the war at sea. Like contemporary British films and international coproductions such as The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1956) and Under Ten Flags (Duilio Coletti, 1960), its contrasts in
studios in the UK (Murphy 1992 : 265) resulted in further international fame in a series of Miss Marple films in which, as with many of the Carry On series, the settings are a bizarre anagram of the ancient and the contemporary. British films of the previous decade had seen the rise of the middle-class senior police detective of Jack Hawkins and John Mills and the decline of the traditional gentleman detective; in Rank’s adaptation of Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke (Roy Baker 1956), Albert Campion is dispensed with altogether. In 1961, Murder She Said
. ‘What I found in film was community. I discovered my world in film.’ 50 It was paradise regained. Notes 1 Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors , eds Jonathan Hacker and David Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 231. 2 Jarman, Kicking the