MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Undergraduate Handbook 1996

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996

ENH2930

National fictions (British)

Proposed to be offered next at Caulfield in 1997

B McFarlane

Synopsis 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, 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

• McFarlane, B Sixty voices BFI Publishing

Recommended texts

• 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