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Post-war films 2 – adaptation and the theatre 6 The British cinema in the post-war period was not overly dependent upon the theatre for its source material. One writer has estimated that ‘of the 1,033 British films of the 1950s listed in David Quinlan’s British Sound Films, some 152 were based on stage plays’.1 On an annual basis the figure never fell below 10 per cent of the annual production output; in some years it reached more than 20 per cent, as in 1948 when there were nineteen stage-originated features out of seventy-four films, and in 1952 when the
Post-war films 1 – genre and British cinema 5 The British cinema emerged from the war period with a high critical reputation, a degree of audience appeal, and with the Rank group well established as a large vertically integrated company ready to challenge the Hollywood majors in the international marketplace. Yet, the early post-war years saw the industry coping with a turbulent period of uncertainty dramatised by a trade war with Hollywood during which the American majors withheld their films from the British market for several months. The uncertainty, however
This book provides an introduction to French film studies. It concentrates on films which have had either a theatrical or video release in Britain, or which are available on video or DVD from France. Most avant-garde film-makers, including Germaine Dulac, were unable to continue in the 1930s, faced with the technical demands and high production costs of the sound film. Exacerbated by the Depression, and above all by the financial collapse of both Gaumont and Pathé, film production fell from 158 features the previous year to only 126 in 1934, and 115 in 1935. While poetic realism was at its height, a talismanic figure in post-war film was faced with a generally lukewarm reception from critics and audiences. Thanks largely to German finance and also to an influx of filmmakers replacing those who had departed, after 1940 French film. If 1968 marked a watershed in French cinema's engagement with politics and history 1974 did the same for representations of sexuality. In that year, pornography entered mainstream French cinema. Although film-making remains male-dominated in France as elsewhere, 'more women have taken an active part in French cinema than in any other national film industry'. A quarter of all French films made in 1981 were polars, and many of those were box-office successes. French fantasy has had a particular national outlet: the bande dessinée. The heritage film often takes its subject or source from the 'culturally respectable classicisms of literature, painting, music'.
3 Reconstruction and retribution: Clouzot’s post-war films Despite the ultimate recognition of Le Corbeau as one of the most significant films made in France during the occupation, its caustic satire of authority and production by the German company Continental Films led to Clouzot and his associates being branded as collaborators and banned from working in the film industry after France was liberated in 1944. This chapter examines the four films with which Clouzot relaunched his career on his return to film-making in 1947 (having effectively been excluded from the
’s presence in post-war film culture remains a blind spot in film studies. 14 Figure 0.3 Wifredo Lam, untitled linocut 005 (5101), 1951 Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries provides the first coherent and expansive look into the dynamic heterogeneity of transnational surrealist film culture since the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the myriad ways in which surrealists themselves engaged with cinema. Past literature on this subject by critics and surrealists has focused largely on three primary areas: films made by surrealists
Cesare Zavattini is principally remembered as a theoretician of neorealism and as the author of the screenplays of some of the major post-war films of Vittorio De Sica ( Sciuscià/Shoeshine 1946, Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thief 1948, Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan 1951, Umberto D . 1952). In fact, his experience was more extensive and varied. He worked in different media and was especially
as a welcome return to form for Duvivier after the perceived unevenness of his output since his return from America. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (1956), no fan of Duvivier in the past, called it ‘puissante, sobre, dense’ (‘powerful, simple, concise’), with a depth and intelligence worthy of Balzac or Tolstoy. Conclusion Marc-Edouard Nabé (2010: 40) calls Duvivier’s post-war films ‘foisonnants, complexes, hyperconstruits’ (‘prolific, complex, hyper- constructed’). Despite a tricky homecoming, Duvivier’s ease with 58 ‘a paralysed film’; ‘faithful to a visual style
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.
forensic evidence presented to the judge and jury. The images represented in crime scene photographs became an increasingly vital narrative in the prosecution and reporting of crime, just as the cinematic depictions of policing in post-war films and television programmes became central to public perceptions of crime and its investigation. By 1974, publicity photographs of the Metropolitan Police could depict the archetypal London crime scene: an investigative team surrounds the body of a young woman in a bomb site, while a crime scene photographer takes pictures. These
represent the greatest cause for anxiety were Germans. Although concern regarding aliens in the post-1945 period was largely focused on non-white immigration, developments in the earlier part of the century had forged a link between Germanness and alien threat, which, combined with the renewed threat of invasion experienced during the recent conflict, the insistence during that conflict on German alterity and the perceived need to shore up British identity, led to the resurfacing of the trope. In this chapter, I will use close readings of two post-war films – Sink the