On "England" and "Englishness" in British Cinema and Television

Updated July 27, 2010

Image from Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

Film Studies For Free was recently very inspired by Nick James's wonderful overview of the career of Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti for next month's Sight and Sound magazine. As a huge fan of Cavalcanti's work, and in particular of his (and Ealing's) Went the Day Well? (indeed, FSFF's author lives in a English village uncannily like that portrayed in this film), it immediately set about researching a list of links to online scholarly works on the Brazilian filmmaker, only to discover very few openly accessible ones in English (do check out, though, Kristin Thompson and David Cairn's essays on Went the Day Well?, and the latter's other postings on Cavalcanti here, here, here, here, and here).

FSFF's author's rage at this overall lack of anglophone material (see the photographic evidence above) was eventually sublimated in a different curatorial project, one still connected to themes at the heart of Cavalcanti's work, and also to some related topics explored in further August 2010 Sight and Sound articles (ones sadly not [yet] online: William Fowler's 'Absent authors: Folk in artist film', and Rob Young's 'The pattern under the plough').

Anyhow, below you will find the fruit of this inspiration and frustration: a list of links to thoughtful and thought-provoking international scholarship on expressions of "England" and (multifarious) "Englishness" in (mostly) British cinema and television.

• José Arroyo, 'The films of Isaac Julien: Look back and talk black', Jump Cut, no. 36, May 1991

• Victoria Ball, 'Female identity and the British female ensemble drama 1995-1998', PhD thesis. Queen Margaret University, 2007

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios, Part II', originally Screen, 15(2), 1974

• Alexandra Lynn Barron, 'Postcolonial Unions: The Queer National Romance in Film and Literature', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2005

• Joe Brooker, 'England's Screening', Film-Philosophy, 3.10, 1999

• Stuart Duncan Brown, 'Uses of Laughter in the Cinematic Representation of the British Working-Class', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, December 2007

• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004 , pp. 59-73

• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground' Screen 2006 47: 1-17

• Katherine Byrne, '“Such a fine, close weave”: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford (2007)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2.2, Winter 2009/2010

• Elizabeth de Cacqueray, 'New Slants on Gender and Power Relations in British Second World War Films', Miranda, No. 2, 2010

• Mónica Calvo Pascual, 'My Beautiful Laundrette: Hybrid "Identity", or the Paradox of Conflicting Identifications in "Third Space" Asian-British Cinema of the 1980s', Miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 26 (2002): pp. 59-70

• E. Anna Claydon, ‘Nostalgia in the Post-National: Contemporary British Cinema and the South-Asian Diaspora’, South Asian Cultural Studies,Vol.2 No.1, 2008, pp 26 - 38

• Robin Cohen, ' Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity: The British Case', Social Identities Vol 1. No. 1 1995, 35−62

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Filmic Representations of the British Raj in the 1980s: Cultural Identity, Otherness and Hybridity', PhD Thesis, Universidad de Zaragoza, March 2009

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Everything You Always Hated about Thatcher's Britain: A Cultural Analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes', Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 28, 2003

• Josephine Dolan, 'Englishness: Heroes, heroines and reciprocal encounters', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006

• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171

• Gillian Dow, 'Lady Bathurst’s Patriotic Ballroom, or “Reading Austen at a Distance”: The French Revolutionary Wars in Recent Adaptations ', Persuasions-Online, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2008

• Geoff Eley, 'Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War II', American Historical Review, 105, 5 (June 2001), 818-838

• Steven Fielding , 'A mirror for England? Cinematic representations of politicians and party politics during the ‘golden age’ of party, c. 1944-64', The First Annual International Conference on Minor Parties, Independent Politicians, Voter Associations and Political Associations in Politics, University of Birmingham, 2007

• Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz, 'Representation and Identity: Shakespeare in the Forties', Estudos Anglo Americanos 17-18 (1993-94)

• Andrew Higson, 'Transnational developments in European cinema in the 1920s',Transnational Cinemas Volume 1, Number 1, 2010

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, University of Leicester, January 1997

• Elena Von Kassel, 'An Image of Britain during the Second World War: The films of Humphrey Jennings (1939-1945)',  Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. IV - n°3 | 2006

• Frank Leishman, 'From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland', University of Gloucestershire Inaugural Lecture No 1, 2008

• Melinda Lewis, 'Renegotiating Britishness through Comedy television', Master Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, August 2009

• Chris Louttit, 'Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television', Adaptation, (2009) 2 (1): 34-48

• Robert Mayer, 'Not Adaptation by ‘Drifting’: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2004

• Michael McCluskey, 'Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside', Scope, Using Moving Image Archives, Edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson, Issue 17, June 2010

• José I. Prieto Arranz, 'Images of English purity: A comparative study of Elizabeth I and Diana, Princess of Wales', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 116)

• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'Whose New World? Derek Jarman’s Subversive Vision of The Tempest (1979)', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Josh Romphf , '“Invention in the Name of Community”: Workshops, the Avant-Garde and The Black Audio Film Collective', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 1 [2010], Iss. 1

• Pave Skopal, 'DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: Framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006

• John C. Tibbetts, 'Between the Map and the Painted Landscape: Kevin Brownlow’s Historical Films',  PREPRINT at Kansas University Repository: Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television, June 2000. 20(2): 227-251

• Rosie White, 'Englishness and espionage: Edith Cavell as the good spy', Identity, and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 129)

• Jonathan Wright, 'Rereading the British Social Realist Film: Samantha Lay's British Social Realism', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8 No. 4, January 2003

'Billy Liar' Studies (in Memory of Keith Waterhouse)

Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear that novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Keith Waterhouse has died, albeit after a long and rich life. He was author of the novel Billy Liar and wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for John Schlesinger's brilliant 1963 film of the same name, one of FSFF's favourites from the British New Wave. He also worked on other great screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966, uncredited).

Below, in memory of Keith Waterhouse's great British cinematic imagination, are some links to online and openly accessible Billy Liar and British New Wave cinema resources:

• Tony Aldgate, 'British New Wave Cinema', Open2.net, November 2002
  
• 'Billy Liar', Monthly Film Bulletin Review, Volume 30, No.356, September 1963
• Michael Brooke, 'The British Hero: Heroic Failures', BFI Screenonline
• Director's Guild of Great Britain, Lifetime Achievement Award to John Schlesinger, Booklet 2002
• Mark Duguid, 'British Film in the 1960s', BFI Screenonline
  
• Bruce Goldstein, 'Billy Liar', The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• Roderick Heath, 'Look Back: Influences and Major Figures of the British Free Cinema', Ferdy on Films, etc, February 20, 2002
• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Leicester Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, 1997
• Gavin Lambert, 'New Wave, Old Problem', The Guardian Online, October 3, 2002
  
• A.O. Scott, 'Billy Liar', The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• B. F. Taylor, 'Major Themes and Minor Movements: Composition and Repetition in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar', in British New Wave: A Certain Tendency (Manchester University Press, 2006) (full disclosure note: work based on a thesis supervised by Catherine Grant)
  
• Phil Wickham, 'Billy Liar (1963), BFI Screenonline