Spécialisation Progressive Culture Sem 4 - en anglais

Civilization Progressive Culture

British Cinema

Oxford dictionary of film studies

National cinema: two underlying assumptions

• Films produced within a particular national context will display some distillation of the historical, political and social culture of that country
• Cinema plays a role in the construction of national identity as an aspect of popular culture

Sociological framework: the mirror vs mould theory of the media

• Mirror suggests the media simply reflects the state of society
• Mould implied media acts as a mould with the power to shape reality for audiences – think about screenwriters as artists

Soft power – representation and presence in the mind of other people – especially nations

Cinema about stories – identification, empathy, integration of values and notions by vicariously living these notions in the film

• Hollywood and hegemony over cinema – as an ideological machine, “nation branding”

Can soft power turn into hard power with cinema? Only in US

Many economic agents mobilized in literature and particularly cinema: it causes local agents – hence sociologically relevant

• Challenging the definition of author
• Author theory: previous belief that socioeconomic place of director in making a film does not correspond to author’s role in writing a book

• Author theory: consider body of work of a director in the same way as you would consider an author, and you should include all the films they made [body of work]
• Cinema is an art and director is an artist

Themes:

• Notion of national cinema – British cinema, Hollywood
• Austenmania – sociology
• Monarchs
• Shakespeare on film – uses of Shakespeare sociologically, functionally…different representations – symbolic capital of Shakespeare – culture
• Thatcherism - political
• Social realism
• Ireland – representation of Ireland in British cinema
• Scotland

National cinema – less popular after globalization – both flourishing and not so much

• “the issue of national cinema as a conundrum that sits problematically among film history, poststructural theory, and the operations of contemporary media policy. From one perspective it is flourishing, keeping well over one hundred state, regional and municipal agencies around the world in business…”
• Media policy – gatekeeping – what is financed and released involves economic and social, cultural etc. factors

“from another perspective, it could be argued that none of this really makes much of an impression on the larger world of cinema, which reamisn dominated by the major studios and similar US-based companies”

• Other films don’t get released as widely as in other non-US/UK countries
• Few people get to see films from outside their country

History:

• WW1: europe’s nations were locked in war, US producers and distributors assumed control of worldwide film supply in 1916
• Concentration of production to a previously impossible degree
• Concentration of market around the US – this caused a new structure for the market of films
• Europe facing severely limited

Francois Truffaut: film criticism in 60s

• “isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’?...the English countryside, the subdued way of life, the stolid routine – that are anti-dramatic in a sense…
• Truffaut 1978: 140
• Goes against the representation of Jane Austin as national spirit

British cinema – an overly brief history

• 1890: filmmaking process – everyone inventing images at once, notion of speed
• 1895: first British film, Incident at Clovelly Cottage
• 1896-1906: Cinema part of the thriving music-hall tradition – but cinema not as an autonomous art  
• 1912: British board of film censors – true birth of British directors (Foucault’s idea) – cinema partnered with censorship

Foucault: authors gain recognizable personalities – authors became authors – because they were created as a punishable entitle, legally accountable for their writings

Authors trying to maximize symbolic capital – e.g. Shakespeare plays in silent film

• By 1915, 3500 film theatres built – gradual autonomisation
• By the end of WWI, US imports dominate British screens
• 1927 cinematograph films act
• Post WWII: rebuilding the national consensus – difficulties with quotas

• British cinema was seen as “quota quickies” without the budget of US films

• 1950s – Prestige cinema (Ealing comedies, David Lean…)
• 60s – 70s: social cinema (influence of TV) – aesthetics in itself

• British films became a source of pride
• Established British identity as something “relevant to today’s world”

• 80s: Thatcherism vs anti-Thatcherism
• 90s: charming little comedies
• 2000s: UK – British partnerships

Films putting British culture on the global map

John Hill, 2001: Contemporary British cinema: industry, policy, identity – cineaste

US-British partnerships – commercial success in US which guaranteed distribution abroad

• National cinema transforms a bit: but keeps some of the culture and social realism

British cinemas – no homogeneous tradition, but rather economic agents each serving own interests

• Critics claimed this was part of the breakup of Britain – less united UK
• Mirror effect theory of art

Austen on film:

• Brand image with bank note – controversy about her image and the chosen quote
• Jane Austen as an industry – comes with the certain capital of sympathy (everybody’s dear Jane)
• Implied author: can deduce personality from the book

Applies to popular culture by adaptations and their resonances

From 1995, rebirth of Austen as a social phenomenon – becomes part of a shared cultural imagination and is reworked

2eme Séance

Sociological, political, historical subtext – cinema as sociologically and ideologically relevant

National cinema is less relevant in a world of globalisation

Austenmania – 1995 – became very important economically – some products claim fidelity to the original, others are kitsch

• Shakespeare represents a distance, almost inaccessible culture – high culture, removed from who we are today
• Jane Austen is less removed from us than Shakespeare – more easily readable

• What is at stake is more modern; negotiating a place for women in society, relevant, notion of coupling to become a functional social unit
• One view of coupling = a functional social unit – no anomia or social placelessness

Austen’s world – located in the time, space and conventions of 19th century England – transfer of this world to our own is easier, especially with girl culture

• Phenomenon that has crystallized at a particular moment in our own contemporary culture
• Variety of media and technologies have revitalized Austen – not as an author, but as a phenomenon – circulation of Austen material including films, internet, tourism, television
• Only wrote 6 novels – material recirculating e.g. remakes – anachronism
• Austen – the most consistently remade – provides a model and an incentive for updating other classical texts into contemporary media

Cultural heritage – Andrew Higson created the concept of heritage films – films that perform exactly what heritage as an economy and culture does – preserving of a nation and helping with the consistency of a nation in its own eyes