National fictions (British)
Proposed to be offered next in 1996
B McFarlane
8 points * 4 hours per week * Second semester * Caulfield * Prerequisites: ENH1100 and ENH1110, or approved equivalents
The period will be mainly 1940-1963, covering the wartime impetus to British cinema, the postwar prestige of British cinema, much of it derived from literary and theatrical sources, and the `new wave' of social realist films, again rooted in literary and theatrical trends, which changed British cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The subject will explore some of the ways in which such a national cinema constructs itself in opposition to the dominant American cinema. It has been a cinema which has foregrounded its affiliation with the literary and the theatrical, with the `high culture' of the period. Film texts include The Way Ahead, Henry V, Odd Man Out, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Intruder, and This Sporting Life.
Assessment
Written (4000 words): 70% * Class test (2000 words): 30%
Prescribed text
Barr C (ed.) All our yesterdays: 90 years of British cinema
Recommended reading
Hill J Sex, class and realism: British cinema 1956-1963
Murphy R Realism and tinsel: Cinema and society in Britain 1939-1948
Murphy R Sixties British cinema
Walker A Hollywood, England: The British film industry in the sixties