Film, Media and Music
This concluding chapter focuses on Zed Nelson’s 2019 film The Street, filmed in the East London borough of Hackney. The film has a simple project: to track the transformations in inner-city Hoxton Street over the four years of filming. Through this undertaking, Nelson tells a more complicated story than the familiar narrative of the changing built environment of the cinematic city. His achievement is to record a micro-history of the changing street as long-established businesses like Anderson’s the bakers and Lawrence’s the carpet shop close, to be replaced with bars and galleries, in a broader context of the continuing spread of the City of London into adjacent previously working-class areas. Framing the changes in the street within the 2010 coalition government’s austerity project and the 2016 Brexit referendum, Nelson explores, using only the careful editing of his informants’ words, the way in which voting to leave Europe could be understood as a response to the loss of a familiar way of life, a familiar street, to the hipsters and incomers of gentrification. This chapter asserts that the detail of the film’s documentation with the careful contextualisation of so many of its characters is what makes the film vivid and compelling. Individual voices linger on, with their rich registers of emotion and attitude long after the images – and their homes and businesses – have faded. It would be a foolish mistake, however, to understand it as a film which is just about Hoxton Street.
This chapter argues that Game of Thrones’ attitude towards its female characters is symptomatic of the commodification of wombs in patriarchal culture. As if to emphasize women’s lack of agency, it is not just that their only significance is in the children they bear and their relationships to them, but that even the modicum of power given them in the source novels is nowhere to be seen in HBO’s adaptation. Through an application of Luce Irigaray’s theories, I argue that women are just a commodity within patriarchy, valuable only for their ability to reproduce.
This chapter provides a consideration of London's role in the global film industry and its status as a production centre for Hollywood tentpole blockbusters. It addresses a series of questions: beyond being an impressive piece of genre spectacle, what does this scene have to tell us about the intersecting industrial, political-economic and cultural factors that shape the production of high-budget franchise films in the UK? What are the qualities and affordances of such spatially dynamic set pieces, and how do they relate to questions of industry, genre, aesthetics and politics? And how might we place this brief but impactful action sequence into the histories of London on screen that have been mapped out by scholars such as Charlotte Brunsdon? Paying attention to production histories, marketing, critical reception and textual analysis, the chapter argues that London’s attraction for the Hollywood studios is a complex mix of financial incentives, institutional arrangements and cultural/aesthetic considerations. London offers filmmakers both difference and familiarity, and a layered, versatile mix of spaces that range from generic global city architecture to highly resonant landmarks. The creative topography of the city in the action sequence is mobilised to create what we might term a kind of ersatz cosmopolitanism: a relatively superficial embodiment of global diversity that engages with ‘foreign’ locations primarily as backdrops for action rather than as rich local cultures. As opposed to focusing on an individual visiting filmmaker, this chapter examines the systemic relationship between Hollywood and the UK and considers the cinematic experience of London that arises from the industrial and cultural dynamics of that relationship.
Globalisation is often depicted as the enemy of ordinary citizens and the destroyer of cities. Global London on screen counters this narrative by exploring high points of cosmopolitan and multicultural worldliness on film, while not neglecting the more troubling migratory histories, exclusionist enclaves and criminal connections that often underpin them. Made by visiting filmmakers from all over the world, these films destabilise and confront conceptions of English or British London. They represent a wide variety of periods and genres, from the 1950s to the present day, and from noir and arthouse films to Hollywood blockbusters. Seldom has a group of London films been conceptualised to challenge universalist assumptions about London’s cultural status to outsiders. Steering clear of British localism, Global London on screen embraces the complexities of this nation and of the world’s most famous city.
In this chapter Jingan MacPherson Young historicises the émigré director working in London’s Soho district. The chapter focuses on the film Miracle in Soho (Julian Amyes, 1957) written and co-produced by émigré filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. Miracle in Soho is a rare post-war British film which arranged the social, urban and cultural topography of London’s Soho through the depiction of the immigrant-as-cosmopolitan. Despite the film initially being a failure critically and at the box office, the topographical specificity that is found within Pressburger’s script suggests a fundamental and instinctive understanding of the urban arrangement of Soho’s commercial economies. The chapter asserts that Miracle in Soho provides an underlying criticism for the disorganisation of urban life but through the prism of an isolated locality and its engagement with the city. Does the film’s representation of Soho merely function as a backcloth for staging the Hungarian Jewish filmmaker’s imaginary conceptualisation of a community where ‘Church’ is erected directly opposite ‘Pub’? By placing Miracle in Soho in the historical and social context of post-war Soho, which during this period attempted to rebrand its disreputable pre-war reputation, this chapter uncovers the ways Pressburger's outsider gaze on the metropolis moulded the film’s depiction of the cosmopolitan and commercial locus.
This chapter turns to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale as yet another example of how a streaming channel has used an adaptation to break into the cluttered television landscape. With its focus on a dystopian America now named Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale centres on the oppression and sexual exploitation of women, with the series taking the narrative into even darker and more violent territory than the source novel. In this chapter, through an application of some of the work of feminist theorist, Dorothy Dinnerstein, argues that The Handmaid’s Tale warns of a land where women’s oppression has been taken to the extreme. The question remains, however, is it Gilead or America itself that is under scrutiny?
The introduction argues that an analysis of the representation of mothers in a selection of American television series can teach us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on mothers in society more broadly. Looking to the soap opera audience, the chapter theorizes a viewing position for quality American television which takes into account the positioning of the monstrous mother and how the audience relates to her.
This introduction establishes art cinema as the key mode of filmmaking that is analysed in Global London on screen. Rather than cinema telegraphing a city’s domestic and dominant character, its larger-than-life-presence and stereotypical imagery, in this collection many of the films analysed counter this notion. Visitor filmmakers tend to make art cinema–styled films, recognised by their international aesthetic that provides a renewed sense of this global city. These cityscapes honed by filmmakers challenge precise geographical, ethnic and historio-cultural contexts. At their peak, creative worlds in London from 1990 to 2016 corresponded to a high period of media content produced in the capital. One consistent element associated with this boom was British genres, institutions and individuals going global, and this drew significant attention from others from around the world, fans who appreciated the customs, uniqueness and particularity of national specificity that London held as an admirable and fashionable multicultural city. London, therefore, means so very much and so very little to people everywhere, in and outside of the city’s limits. The one consistency regarding this idea of London as a global city is how much it summons a totality about its greatness, inconsequentiality and fallibility, often simultaneously, when it is named.
This chapter argues, through a study of a recent television adaptation, that the portrayal of motherhood, regardless of the original source story and how many women are involved in production, becomes subsumed by the patriarchal attitudes of the mass media and its (mainly) male executives. Having been cancelled and re-commissioned three times, the final series became a solo project for Netflix. It is this final season that culminates in a startling hostility towards working mothers only hinted at previously, and this despite the creative input of its female showrunner, Veena Sud.
This chapter outlines the origins of many of the motherhood ‘norms’ that we have grown to accept and how they have been consolidated through the years. This discussion of the mother and her positioning in society looks at the many ways that motherhood, or even the prospect of it, has historically been used economically, politically and culturally to discriminate against women. The chapter also argues that motherhood lacks agency in contemporary society and that there is a tension between patriarchy, feminism, society’s needs and women’s basic rights.