This thesis explores British film culture in the 1970s through an examination of specific film texts and a range of social, cultural, industrial and institutional contexts. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach and draws on the methods and practices of both cultural historians and scholars of film. Rigorous archival and historical research is thus combined with close textual analysis of visual sources to explore the relationships between film culture, its social and economic context and wider period concerns. My work is revisionist and source-based and actively challenges much of the received wisdom about the period. Using archival sources, my thesis develops a set of contexts in which to examine the fortunes of the British film industry throughout the decade. In addition, it surveys technological and institutional changes which impact upon the development of visual style. Examining the film industry in this way enables a map of production, distribution and exhibition to be drawn. It allows for changes and new trends to be acknowledged and scrutinised. I pay particular attention to new interventions in the industry from diverse fields and changes to established institutional practices in respect, for example, of cinema's relationship to television. The thesis then examines how successive governments attempted to support or discipline the film industry, what policy initiatives and legislation were created for these purposes and the differing approaches to the industry from Labour and Conservative administrations. My examination of film censorship within the thesis demonstrates how social controls also played an important role in mediating film culture and how the British Board of Film Censors adapted to changes in popular taste and levels of permission. I show how the BFFC followed a broadly unchanged liberal policy which relied upon pragmatism rather than a formalised approach which often came into conflict with pressure groups and the political Right. Presenting this range of contexts situates my discussion of the film culture of the period within the broad socio-political climate, and suggests the importance to the industry of external and internal factors in determining film production during the 1970s. The second half of my thesis then presents six case studies of 1970s British films selected for the richness and diversity of their archival material. These case studies are neither typical nor representative but rather are used to explore issues raised by the first half of the thesis, such as methods of production and finance, marketing and distribution and the importance of popular taste. Particular attention is also given to their visual style as well as to issues of authorship, stardom, and popularity. The thesis then relates these chosen films to the wider film culture and examines the cultural tasks they perform and their ideological functions. Specific attention here is paid to the importance of creative agency and it addresses more speculative ideas of manner, performance and visual style in the 1970s. The examination of selected film texts raises questions about the way in which cinema engages selectively with contemporary concerns. It also considers the cinema's omissions and evasions, and examines its distinctive modes of address in this period. My work demonstrates the unpredictable relationship between capital and culture in 1970s British cinema and draws upon modem methodologies of film history.

This thesis presents a reassessment of the first major British film production crisis. which occurred between 1908 and 1911, through a case study of the Hepworth Manufacturing Company, Ltd (hereafter HMC). In this period British producers saw sales slump and the quality of their films criticised, and standard histories have blamed them for this crisis, describing their conduct as stagnant and incompetent. Challenging these accusations, this thesis examines in depth the advances made by HMC from its inception in 1899 in three key areas. Firstly it looks at filmmaking, examining how HMC developed its production methods and its studio. Secondly it explores how HMC adopted a standardised narrative structure for its films which it augmented by borrowing from a pool of narrative elements in a narrative bricolage. Taking this notion of bricolage further, it thirdly explores how HMC structured its output generically through a similar bricolage of pioneer generic elements and how this approach to genre manifested itself in the market as a strategy to ensure maximum revenues. It contextualises this by presenting at the outset an overview of the development of the British film industry from its origins in 1894 to 1911, highlighting the hitherto overlooked importance of distribution to this development, and studying HMC's relationship to the growing rental sector and the threat posed by the rise of film distribution. Finally it devises a new schema for examining films within exhibition and presents a case study of the circulation of HMC films. The conclusion reviews the state of the market and the attempts made by the HMC to survive within it, taking the position that the strategies of HMC were rendered ineffective by market forces, and that it was only through diversification into distribution and exhibition that HMC, and all the producers, could have avoided the crisis.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

French writings on British cinema have tended, and continue, to be dominated by one single figure. Director Francois Truffaut's famous dismissal of British cinema has become a standard reference. The systematic repetition of his critique has worked to produce an official story that has become emblematic of the French perspective on British cinema. Yet to date the subject has received little scholarly attention beyond Truffaut. This study documents in depth the French reception of British cinema in the post-war period and relies extensively on the use of archives and research into primary sources including unpublished historical documents and the use of oral sources. These are supplemented by secondary materials such as survey histories of cinema, national film histories, anthologies of film criticism and biographies of film critics and film journals. The thesis is divided into four chapters that relate to four distinct historical periods from the immediate post-war years up to the late 1990s. In each of the chapters I relocate critical texts and ideas within the historical conjuncture from which they have emerged. In the process, the thesis uncovers positive readings of British cinema and thus redresses the historiography that has characterised the representation of the French perspective as uniformly negative. The central argument of this thesis centres on an examination of critical writings as inverted discourses on French cinema. Considering contemporary reviews as a prism through which the identity of French cinema may be articulated or refracted, I show that the discourses of auteurism and realism have played a key role in the debates around cinema and thus in the critical construction of British cinema. I conclude that the French reception of British cinema must be understood as an articulation of anxieties, concerns and struggles around the identity of French cinema itself.

No description available.