British Cinema

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@ Greg X ……….. but something like being more rooted in “the Real” ……… there is a practical side to British cinema ……….. socio-political elements are freely mixed in without becoming abstract. allegorical or symbolic …………..here is a greater feeling of solidity or permanence to British films, that there is an expectation of things having had and continuing to proceed along a course that is somewhat known as opposed to feelings of instability or questioning. ……….forthrightness or certainty

I think it has to do with the winding down of their empire in the 20th Century. The way in which that happened vastly different than with that of France. I would say that has partly to do with Britain’s relationship with the US after WWII.

Real = uncertainty
Imaginary = certainty

Britain imagines they still rule the waves; hence, the certainty.

No Robert, I’m speaking on a general level not about any particular artist, so I’m suggesting a tendency for commercial concerns or larger box office numbers has had a greater impact on British film history than it comp[comparatively has had in many other countries in Europe, which I assume one would consider to be the best match for looking at the way they’ve produced films over the years which has increased, as far as I can tell, their tendency to making films that are both crowd pleasing and with artistic merit. Certainly there is popular cinema everywhere, and has been, but I think the money possibilities available to British cinema has had a greater effect on their artists than those otherwise comparable countries which changes the way many of their artists make films and whether they stay in the country at all.

There are obviously “art house” directors there, and they do have teh advantage of having had BBC tv to work for over the years which fits more closely within the government support of the arts model in much of the rest of Europe. I wasn’t speaking of TV productions before, but that is an area where the Brits have it over we statesiders.

Lower budgets tend to demand less focus on spectacle, and therefore more on things like writing, acting, and clever camera work to create an impact. It was a comparison against the tendency in US cinema in general to provide films with much higher production values in terms of all the associated artisans that can be brought in to work on films in special effects, sets, stuntwork, and the like. The British Isles have some great natural locations and a rich historical record so it’s easy and relatively cheap to do historical dramas where they don’t have to spend that much money to get a lot of juice for it, so there are areas where they can provide spectacle of a sort, but as I’m speaking in general terms, I didn’t go into all the options out there. Just throwing some basic conceptions and possibilities around to see what people say.

“I would say that has partly to do with Britain’s relationship with the US after WWII.”

The British decided to “rule” parts of Southern Europe leaving Soviets to rule anything above the Mediterranean except of course Germany which belonged to Americans (let’s not hide under our sleeves), the British pretty much lost everything because the “reds” established their political influence in the eastern region, thus the “Americans” established their dominance in every North and South American corner and “broadening” their financial scopes to almost all Asian lands. Africa is another kind of tale…

Have anyone seen a British film called Hope and Glory by John Boornman?

One of the things i love about this movie is how the filmmaker expertedly blends myth with drama… Another thing I love about this movie is how it tells us that there is another world beyond the everyday and the film also explore moral issues quite deeply.

a wonderful movie!

Ah, sorry Robert, I wrote over your last post so I didn’t see it until now. Yes, there is the feeling that comes from some Brits that they chose to give up their empire rather than having lost it, and that tension plays out in some of the more liberal films, and things like punk rock, that come from there.

I think an interesting way to counterfactually think of British cinema would be to imagine that the US was a French speaking nation. How would this have changed world film culture if other factors remained more or less the same? Would there be a lot more British directors we think of as groundbreaking artists since they may not have had the chance to go to Hollywood and make genre pictures? Would we have someone like Carne taking the place of Hitchcock in the US? Would the Cahiers critics have remarked as favorably about US films after the war if they were in French? (They seemed to have an anti-French bias at times, but it is unclear if that would have carried over to other films in the language or just remained about those made in France. A more closely linked relationship to the US may have made the films seem less interesting.) Or how would the French New Wave have changed if Hollywood producers were throwing money at then to come over and make films here with bigger budgets? Would directors like Ridley Scott seem more interesting if they had stayed home and made smaller budget pictures or ones more aimed at a local market rather than something much bigger? And so on…

The questions obviously can’t be answered, but I am a firm believer that the means and methods of production shift the way art is made and that money changes the artist and art, so I think the connection between the US and Great Britian is an important thing to consider regarding the film history there.

(It is true that Hollywood didn’t merely try to hire British directors to come and work here, but I think, in general, the Brits have had more success with the crossover than directors from elsewhere.)

Humphrey Jennings in my opinion was the greatest poetic documentary filmmaker that has ever lived. During WW2 from what I’ve seen, no country was able capture the war as lyrically and beautifully as the major British filmmakers (especially the ones that merged from mass observation).

I love Douglas and Davis too, but the biggest problem with British cinema is its mixed ideals and identity.
It doesn’t know if it wants to be Hollywood or European cinema. Being British is European, yet we seem to relate more to America and its mainstream culture.

Bill Douglas mentioned it once; we want to be a commercial Hollywood, yet a credible and cultured cinema (like our neighbours) at the same time.

This isn’t totally pertinent but you know, I would love to see a feature adaptation of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I daresay, in the hands of a formidable director, it would be quite epic.

Anna Corrie – I feel the same way. Although there are always exceptions and recently I’ve found a few more films to love. However, I have often wondered if there isn’t some level of embarrassment about money which affects British cinema?? On the whole there is an attitude that if you’re going to spend that much on making a film then it either needs to justify itself commercially (hence the films which ape Hollywood and the period dramas which always sell to the US market) or morally, hence the strong bent towards social realism and films which are intended as correctional for our social conscience.

As a nation, I think there’s a fear of pandering to “the ponces” with what might be regarded as self-indulgent personal or art films. I dunno. I’m generalizing massively. However, from reading interviews with filmmakers and studying the system a little bit it does strike me that it’s a lot easier to get funding for some realist drama set on a council estate because although it might be regarded as “challenging” in some ways, it is also totally linear and dialogue-intensive and therefore seen as “accessible” to the wider public and therefore a good use of lottery money! There’s a perception that any film which isn’t purely commercially entertaining must be “improving”, must educate us out of our social complacency. Again, it’s almost like the embarrassment of having £?million at their disposal compels filmmakers to apologise for themselves with movies about poverty! Not to say there aren’t great films to be made about poverty but there’s a distinction between feeling free to interpret it rather than just depict the misery of it. The funding system for filmmakers always has a major impact on what eventually gets produced. I think British cinema has been in crisis with this for a long time and who knows whether the recent abolishment of the UK Film Council will help or hinder this???

Are we Brits also too scared of awkward silence???! For my taste, the greatest cinema shows not tells. We are so wedded to our dialogue over here – I rarely see a British film which allows itself silence to breathe, to reflect… It’s such a national stereotype that British people feel the need to punctuate silence with a joke or something – but it’s true in some ways and it strikes me that it’s reflected in our cinema.

These are just vague but slightly impassioned musings of mine and I personally think British cinema would benefit from thinking of itself as part of European cinema rather than seesawing between an island mentally where it’s all about local issues for local people, then back to Shepperton as Hollywood.

All said, some recent-ish British films I liked:

Hunger, Fish Tank, Red Road, Exit Through The Gift Shop, Ratcatcher, Last Resort, Under The Skin

British cinema is good but i would prefer to see the movies of Hollywood and that is better.

-Would directors like Ridley Scott seem more interesting if they had stayed home and made smaller budget pictures or ones more aimed at a local market rather than something much bigger?-

Well, that’s an interesting question. I think in some ways it could be argued that (unfortunately, perhaps) the British film industry works as a kind of auxiliary to the American film industry, so that just about any British filmmaker whose ambitions more or less match up with Hollywood aesthetics—Hitchcock, the brothers Scott, late career Carol Reed,etc.—ends up going to worh there, so a lot of what sticks in terms of British cinema is the filmmakers is the outliers from the Hollywood model—the kitchen sinkers and Leigh, a socialist realist like Loach, Jarman, Davies, etc., with the occasion figure like Boorman able to move back and forth with a relative degree of success in both systems.

It’s interesting that you mention Ridley Scott as a hypothetical, though, since, generally speaking, although Hollywood productions, his films are generally far more commercially successful in the international markets than they are in the US (I seem to recall the breakouts of the grosses on his recent films generally being consistantly ~35% US/65% international . . . as a point of comparison, Michael Bay’s Transformers films, Bad Boy II, etc. are much closer to splitting 50/50).

Oh, god, Boorman, I forgot about him. He definitely goes with Roeg, Ken Russell and those two cinematographer sometimes directors Jack Cardiff and Freddie Francis against the “grounded” theory I had. I’m sure there are some others as well, but I can’t think of them offhand, other than Richard Lester being a somewhat flighty type I suppose…

That’s kinda weird about Scott’s films. I’m not sure why that would be the case, especially since he made Blackhawk Down and GI Jane which seem fairly UScentric in their appeal. Maybe Russell Crowe opens big outside the US? Some sort of auteur thing that hasn’t caught on here? Hmm…

Speaking of Lester, one of the things that I was mulling over was how much the unfamiliar works to enhance our perceptions of merit, and if a shared language can actively minimize, to some degree, our appreciation of a filmmakers work due to seeming less unusual than it would if it were in a different language. If Truffaut and co had felt more tied to US traditions of filmmaking would their films have struck the same chord, or even been as possible in the form we know them, since, in my imaginary scenario, they would have been more a part of the traditions that created those films. I mean if there had been directors like Duvivier, Pagnol and Carne coming over and making genre pictures, would that make the Cahiers folks feel those films were worth less or was it really always about the directors alone? Would a director like Richard Lester seem more important if he was working in a different language from a tradition outside the mainstream? I have a gut suspicion that one of the reasons Bergman was regarded more highly outside of Sweden than within it was that most of the world doesn’t understand Swedish, so hearing those lines didn’t seem as ponderous as it may have felt to a Swedish critic. I think reading those sorts of metaphysical questions is easier in some ways than hearing some one say them where they can feel overblown or false.

“Powell and Pressberger have always felt too timid, or too distant for me.”

Herschel Gordon Lewis they’re not.

They top my list of British greats. Tat list also includes Alfred Hitchcock, Lindsay Anderson, David Lean, Ken Russell and Donald Cammell.

Everyone SERIOUSLY interested in the British cinema should read Raymond Durgnat’s “A MIrror For England.”

What British Cinema?

“The British cinema is boring and reflects a submissive way of life, where enthusiasm, zeal and impetus are quickly rooted out. The film is born loser just for being English.” – François Truffaut

-Oh, god, Boorman, I forgot about him.-

Another interesting case of a somewhat unconventional British career for me is Mike Hodges, whose quasi- realist crime drama Get Carter now routinely appears of British lists of top British films. His follow-up, a comedic take on the genre (financed by United Artists), disappeared. Then he went to Warner Bros. to do a relatively high-profile, big-budgeted adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel Terminal Man, and turned out a very unconventional film . . . which seems to have all but disappeared from the public consciousness as well (until recently) . . . although Malick is reportedly a big admirer of the film. Then he got fired from one of Damien: Omen II, made Flash Gordon for Universal, which flopped in the US, but was a big hit in Britain, then returned to the UK to do the sci-fi comedy Morons From Outer Space. He worked in Ireland but for Hollywood on the disowned A Prayer for the Dying. Then he did Black Rainbow, a pretty good thriller which was a British production shot in the US with American actors, that Palace films couldn’t afford to give a proper UK release and Miramax shelved altogether. Then, finally, Hodges returns the British crime drama mode with Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.

Greg, your counterfactual about a French speaking Hollywood is too big a departure for me to find it very useful to speculate. But the Ridley Scott question is interesting. If he had been making British films, I can easy imagine that he would have ended up making films with budgets on the large size for British productions, but, of course, much smaller than he has in Hollywood. My guess is that this would have yielded good films. He still would have had the resources to develop a similarly distinctive visual style, but might he have been able to go farther with “variation on a genera” films? “Alien” was quite the take on horror film. I don’t think he has had as much room to maneuver as he did in his early work.

No one has yet mentioned Edgar Wright.

Look, I’m just sayin’… I’m going to throw Boyle right back in to the master list, too, I don’t care what anybody says about him the man makes the best damn two-hour-long music videos with story in the post-musical age. He also makes hand-held cinematography look like purposeful and detailed blocking.

Oh, and Powell and Pressburger were masters. Black Narcissis timid and distant? The Red Shoes timid and distant? Not an Archers work, but PEEPING TOM TIMID AND DISTANT?

But since we’re talking “British” cinema, are we also, uh, talking Ireland? Scotland? Is it “Great Britain” cinema or just “Britain” cinema that is “British”? Damn their weird and confusing geography! (<—-JOKE, since I know people aren’t going to take it as one).

‘Cause if Ireland counts, I just want to put a shout out to my man Neil Jordan. ’S’all.

—PolarisDiB

A year or so ago i would have been quite dismissive of British cinema overall, at least compared with certain nations. But since then i’ve come to love films like Comrades and The Pumpkin Eater to go with existing favourites, and from the last few years i’ve really enjoyed 2 documentaries Sleep Furiously and Of Time and the City. It’s a great pity the Valleywood project hasn’t taken off, that would have been a boost for British cinema and put Wales on the world map; i asked Barry Norman who’s a friend of Dickie Attenborough, about it, and it seems it’s all on hold, i wonder if it’ll ever be viable.

Britain is too tied culturally to the US but without the big studio and financial clout for blockbusters, so many talents go to Hollywood. Welsh actors have a better chance there. There has been a tradition of inferior gangster films, some pretty good to excellent horror at one time, gritty social realism, period costume dramas that may seem too conservative and uncinematic but at their best are impressive. There is a suspicion in some quarters of “culture”, certainly compared with France, and several years back i read an article about British and Korean film students- the former inclined to follow media studies and TV while the Koreans were studying Mizoguchi.

This is not a golden age for British cinema but nor is it dead- compares favourably still with the feeble mid-late 70s. But UK isn’t alone in not quite matching its golden age, France, Italy, Germany, Japan are below their peak too, while previously neglected Asian and Latin American countries are thriving on the arthouse circuit. There has always been a place for eccentric talents in UK though and with the economy and cuts there may be some sort of 80s style backlash v the govt, from the point of view of damaged communities, in films, but there is less community spirit now

Dimitris, i would consider Greenaway an Anglo-Welsh internationalist, and Python as firmly British (though including Welshman Terry Jones)- i’ve had to clutch at straws, as Wales is the cinderella country in many respects, certainly with no great indigenous film-making tradition; talent instead in the service of others. Even Ken Loach has preferred Scotland and N.Ireland. I must put him right. The Welsh language is the native language of Britain but Welsh language films have made little impact, just a couple nominated for Foreign Language Oscars even as they were completely ignored by the BAFTAS. I don’t like the national media tendency to equate England with Britain. Last night on the main BBC news we had minutes on England v Hungary football and no mention of the other home nations’ results, which is typical.

We also need a cultural change so that “foreign films” become a regular feature on TV; it’s all very Anglophone and parochial; this diminishes the informed arthouse talent base.

Oh and i forgot to say i’m quite taken with Derek Jarman’s Blue, now in the Directors Cup; i’ve not been a big fan of his work generally, but this is a pretty daring and touching film with a more interesting spark than i’d expected. I’ve done selections of both “essential” and favourite British films in my list in the Lists section; this may be helpful for an overview of what UK has come up with over the years- surely can’t all be dismissed as boring!- and to judge the current crop, and i’d be grateful for other suggestions

No one has mentioned, Ronald Neame, whose adaptation of The Horse’s Mouth is, I think, one of the outstanding British films of that period., and Tunes of Glory is quite good. He later worked in Hollywood directing films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Odessa File (which are, well, less than outstanding).

David Mackenzie is another Scot I’ve held high hopes for. I think Young Adam is great, though perhaps a sense of Alexander Trocchi’s novel is a prereq? His work since then has been a mixed bag.

A few more names:

David MacDonald
Peter Watkins
Peter Mullan

By Neame i liked Hopscotch. Not seen it for years but it stayed in my mind when i was at Salzburg, and wanting sun as in the film, but it pissed down. Andrea Arnold- Red Road, Fish Tank- has some promise

Yes, I like Arnold’s work so far, though I hope she can break of the “British realism” mold. She’s supposedly doing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights next. From what I’ve read she’s trying to reach out to Britain’s Romany community (apologies if this is not how this community prefers to refer to itself, I certain mean no offense) in an attempt to find a more authentic-seeming Heathcliff, which would certainly be interesting. Otherwise it seems doomed to be another conventional British literary adaptation.

Guilty pleasure, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

I’ve never been too much of a fan of my national cinema – at least in it’s present state. I love Powell & Pressburger and the Ealing comedies, and quite enjoy some British New Wave films. But Shane Meadows probably epitomises what I dislike about British cinema today. It’s all so dull and dreary, and without the raw anger than defined a true classic like Look Back in Anger. British cinema needs to leave the confines of the council estate, or at least do something more interesting within it.

Matt, that would be fantastic, Arnold giving a chance for romanies; i don’t think Olivier was exactly convincing, more romanticised than romany. Then again, he was playing an adoptee brought up as a gentleman

Really I dare anyone to watch all the films on this list and then call British cinema boring:)

The Other Side of the Underneath: Britain’s Hidden Cinema

Has anyone mentioned Fatworld yet? That’s a short animation i like a lot, and we should include films by some U.S directors based in UK like Losey, Gilliam, Kubrick and Quay bros (i love Street of Crocodiles), also Len Lye and the GPO films of the 30s

@Ana Corrie: yes i like Hope and Glory, it’s unusual having war film as adventure lark from a boy’s perspective and i was delighted by the ending with the school

here’s the first part of Flatworld

Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit films have been very popular internationally of course