Great Britain

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Great Britain

EARLY CINEMA PIONEERS
QUOTAS, QUOTA QUICKIES, AND SOUND
JOHN GRIERSON AND THE
DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT
WARTIME FEATURE FILM PRODUCTION
POSTWAR FILM
THE 1960s AND 1970s
FROM THE 1980s TO THE PRESENT
SCOTLAND AND WALES
FURTHER READING

Any consideration of the cinema of Great Britain raises two key problems. First is the dominance of Hollywood cinema. English is the primary language of British cinema and, of course, of Hollywood. Britain's decline in the twentieth century has been matched by the rise of the United States as an economic power. As a key American export, Hollywood film served as a considerable influence on and a hindrance to the development of cinema in Great Britain. The absence of any language barrier made the British market an attractive one for Hollywood. Throughout most of its history, British cinema has struggled to compete against the Hollywood monolith.

The second problem is the very notion of Great Britain itself, which is hardly a unified whole, but rather is composed of other nations, prominently England but also Scotland and Wales. Additionally, Northern Ireland—which together with Great Britain constitutes the United Kingdom (UK)—must compete with other UK films as well as with the burgeoning film industry in the Republic of Ireland. In both a critical and popular sense, it is England that has been equated with Britain, and it is the English film industry, with its economic base in London, that has dominated British cinema. A further complication is the United Kingdom's ties to the European Union, which has led to an increase in co-productions where aspects of national identity tend to become subsumed.

Presently, the United Kingdom averages about one hundred feature films per year, but this number includes co-productions in which British interests may comprise only a minority stake. In the 1980s the average number of features produced was only forty-three, so current numbers represent a substantial rise. Changes in funding practices, as well as increased emphasis on co-productions, are leading causes of this apparent production boom. Funding was previously much more closely tied to exhibition, or at least to the possibilities of exhibition, either theatrically or on television. Current funding is primarily through the National Lottery, the monies from which are doled out by various regional film bodies, which are able to encourage production but rarely provide exhibition outlets. Anxiety over the state of the British film industry has been a recurring issue throughout the industry's history. In reality, Great Britain shares fears of Hollywood dominance with numerous other nations and yet, despite an ongoing inferiority complex, has a cinema history that is rich, varied, and reasonably successful.

EARLY CINEMA PIONEERS

Great Britain was a key early adopter of emerging cinema technology. In fact, it could be argued that British cinema history predates even the arrival of the Lumière Brothers in 1895. Augustin Le Prince (1842–1890), who disappeared in 1890 while returning from a visit to his brother in his native France, was reputed to have successfully experimented with motion pictures. Patents for which Le Prince applied, as well as remnants of his work, suggest that his experiments were successful, yet his work seems to have had no real influence, and he remains a curious cinematic footnote. Instead, it is the first Lumière show, in London in February 1896, that may be said to have inaugurated cinema exhibition in Great Britain.

It was not long after this that homegrown British films began to emerge. There were three main centers of production for these early films: London, Yorkshire, and Brighton and Hove. The period between 1895 and 1905 can be seen as one of great productivity and influence, with the early British films being as innovative and prolific as their counterparts in France and the United States. Perhaps it was the influence of music hall traditions that enabled British film to emerge quickly as a world leader. Certainly, a great deal of the content of the films was derived from existing music hall acts, and undoubtedly the two popular forms shared audiences, particularly in more provincial towns and cities. Robert W. Paul (1869–1943) constructed a makeshift studio on the rooftop of the Alhambra theater in Leicester Square, making frequent use of music hall performers within his films. Another London-based company, the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, constructed its film studio at the rear of the Tivoli Music Hall. In addition to the music hall, magic lanternists and other late-nineteenth-century showmen quickly adopted film as a new form of entertainment.

One of Great Britain's most significant film pioneers was Cecil Hepworth (1874–1953), the son of a renowned magic lantern showman. Hepworth began his film career assisting another key pioneer, the inventor and sometime filmmaker Birt Acres (1854–1918), who had collaborated with R. W. Paul (before the two bitterly fell out). After working for transplanted American producer Charles Urban at Maguire and Baucus, Hepworth founded his own company, along with his cousin, Monty Wicks, in 1899, under the name Hepworth and Company, building a studio in the back garden of a house in Walton-on-Thames, a suburb of London. In 1904 the company became the Hepworth Manufacturing Company, and Hepworth turned his attention away from directing and worked exclusively as a producer. His company was responsible for a number of key early films, the most notable of which was Rescued by Rover (1905), directed by Lewis Fitzhamon (1869–1961). This film, with its narrative of a "gypsy" kidnapping of a baby followed by its rescue, seems to have been the inspiration for D.W. Griffith's first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908). In technical terms, Rescued by Rover was a major innovation, and it was also a tremendous audience pleaser. Despite its groundbreaking elements, the film arrived near the end of the early period of British innovation; so rather than heralding a move forward, it seems more the peak of a primitive mode of filmmaking that would soon be eclipsed by technological and economic developments in other countries.

Other early British filmmakers also influenced developments elsewhere. A key figure in Brighton and Hove was James Williamson (1855–1933), a pharmacist and photographer who began making films in 1897 under the Williamson Kinematograph Company name. Williamson's Fire! (1901) was a tableaux film that employed the local Hove fire service in constructing a rescue narrative that included shots from both outside and within a burning building. The film was an obvious influence on Edwin S. Porter's later American film, Life of an American Fireman (1903). Williamson enjoyed success with his comedies as well as increasingly complex dramas until 1910, when changes in the economic models of international cinema led him to place his focus on the manufacture of camera equipment. George Albert Smith (1864–1959) of Brighton had enjoyed earlier success as an innovative operator of magic lantern shows, and he brought this same flair for innovation to the cinema. His films seem to have been less influential than those of some of his counterparts; rather, it is his technical developments that had the most lasting effect. Smith made innovative use of close-ups in such early films as the rather self-explanatory As Seen through a Telescope (1900) and Grandma's Reading Glass (1900); he also successfully incorporated trick elements such as reverse motion in The House That Jack Built (1900). His later career was devoted to the development of color in film through a two-color additive process known as Kinemacolor that he promoted along with Charles Urban.

This first decade of British film saw other noteworthy pioneers emerge, including the aforementioned R. W. Paul, whose Paul's Animatograph Works produced films by a number of other key figures. These included the magician W. R. Booth (1869–1938), whose films, including The "?" Motorist (1906), employed trick photography in the mode of Georges Méliès. Additionally, Frank Mottershaw's A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903), made for his Sheffield photo company, is a fast-paced action film that is said to have influenced Porter's The Great Train Robbery later that same year.

Still, despite its early influence, British cinema seemed to wane as other cinemas became more progressive and technically innovative. A reliance on adaptations of noted British novels and stage plays, while appeasing nationalist sentiments, left the British cinema stagy and wooden, with proscenium arch framing and side-to-side, stage-style movement dominating the structures of films. As the market for cinema changed, British companies were either reluctant or ill-prepared to meet the needs of the industry. Even before World War I, American companies were establishing offices in Britain, and exhibitors soon had an abundance of well-made titles at their disposal. Most of the early British pioneers had ceased making films, while those who continued, such as Hepworth, struggled. His one-hour version of Hamlet in 1913 was indicative of the reliance on stage adaptations. In 1923 he adapted Helen Mathers's 1875 novel, Comin' Thro the Rye, his second adaptation of the novel, and his company, renamed Hepworth Picture Plays, was unable to survive its critical and commercial failure. While it was an intrinsically British film in terms of subject matter, Comin' Thro' the Rye was made in a style that was outmoded, and it was no competition for the much slicker products arriving from Hollywood and elsewhere.

QUOTAS, QUOTA QUICKIES, AND SOUND

Responding to growing concerns over the increasing American dominance of the domestic market for films in Britain, Parliament in 1927 passed the Cinematograph Films Act, the first government intervention aimed at protecting the British film industry. The passage of this legislation was linked to the development of a growing cinema culture in Great Britain, which was also expressed through the founding of The Film Society in London in 1925 and the growing critical attention paid to film in the print media, including the specialist film magazine Close Up, which first appeared in 1927. The Act introduced a quota mandating a minimum allotment of screen time to British films that began at 5 percent in 1927 and was to rise to 20 percent by 1936.

The immediate effect of the legislation was a sharp rise in the number of British production companies, including British International Pictures, founded by John Maxwell as part of the vertically integrated Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) and the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (GBPC), which merged a number of distribution, production, and exhibition companies under the auspices of Isidore Ostrer. The majority of the new companies floundered because their output was largely of inferior quality. The arrival of sound further hastened their demise. British International succeeded, as its Elstree studio was an early adopter of sound recording equipment. The larger company (ABPC) also controlled ABC Cinemas, a major British chain, guaranteeing itself an exhibition outlet for its productions. Gaumont-British survived because it too held extensive exhibition interests, and also because of a deal that Ostrer had struck with American producer William Fox, although the company remained under British control. This retention of control was not always the case in the industry. Significantly, the quota applied to films that were produced by a company constituted in the British Empire rather than specifically British-controlled companies. This led to the development of "quota quickies," films that satisfied the basic requirements of the quota system but that did not require large investment; these were frequently made by subsidiaries of the existing American majors, either within Britain or in some cases in Canada. While many critics have dismissed the bulk of these quota quickies, there is no doubt that they resulted in a boom in British cinema production. In fact, exhibitors regularly exceeded the quota requirements that had been established.

The era saw the development of a viable and sustainable film culture in Britain. Numerous key figures emerged at this time, figures who would continue to be influential in British cinema in the ensuing decades. Gaumont-British had joined forces with Gainsborough Studios in 1927 and Gainsborough co-founder Michael Balcon (1896–1977) became head of production for both companies. Gaumont-British focused on the "quality" films, while Gainsborough was to create works with more popular appeal. Among the directors who had worked under Balcon at Gainsborough was Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980). Hitchcock had his start in the film industry working on design and creating titles for the London office of the American firm Famous PlayersLasky (later Paramount). When the firm left London, Hitchcock moved to Gainsborough, where he was exposed to its German-based productions through the company's ties to Ufa. As part of his work for Gainsborough, Hitchcock was on the set of F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), and the influence of German expressionism is evident in his early British work, including The Lodger (1927).

Hitchcock directed Britain's first feature-length sound film, Blackmail (1929). He actually shot two simultaneous versions of the film—one with sound, the other silent, as many theaters were not yet equipped with sound technology. The film was made for British International Pictures, which had lured Hitchcock away from Gainsborough with a large contract, expecting that Hitchcock would shoot only a portion in sound, but the director instead shot most of the film in sound. The film was a huge critical and commercial success, with even Close Up, whose critics were so often harshly critical of British film, willing to offer praise. Following his association with British International Pictures, Hitchcock returned to his working relationship with Balcon, making, among other films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935) for Gaumont-British. After Balcon left to become head of production at MGM-British, Hitchcock made The Lady Vanishes (1938) for Gainsborough, though the film was commissioned by MGM. The latter film was the third screenplay written by Frank Launder (1906–1997) and Sidney Gilliat (1908–1994), who would continue to be significant contributors to British cinema in writing, directing, and producing well into the 1970s.

Gaumont-British and Gainsborough aided the careers of other significant figures within British cinema. Among these were the directors Anthony Asquith (1902–1968) and Victor Saville (1895–1979). As a founding member of The Film Society, Asquith was able to incorporate his firsthand knowledge of Hollywood with his knowledge of European cinema. Asquith's early career indicated promise but was not met with much critical acclaim. In 1932 he joined Gainsborough, where he was involved in a range of projects and duties. Later in the decade he co-directed Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play, with the film's star, Leslie Howard. With this film Asquith finally received the break that would help propel him to greater recognition

ALEXANDER KORDA
b. Sándor Lászlo Kellner, Pusztatúrpásztó, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary),
16 September 1893, d. 23 January 1956

Hungarian-born, Korda became a naturalized British subject in 1936 and was the first film industry figure to be knighted, in 1942. Yet the issue of nationality and his relationship to the British film industry has always been a thorny one. Undoubtedly Korda played a central role in the development of the industry in Great Britain. His The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) represented a major breakthrough for British cinema, paving the way for successes in the American market. At the same time, Korda's devotion to "prestige" pictures, ambitious costume films that most frequently chronicled key historical figures and that made use of theatrical traditions, encouraged the industry to strive for production standards it could not sustain, contributing to the industry's economic collapse in 1937.

By the time Korda came to Britain he had already established his filmmaking credentials in Hungary. After World War I, the unstable political situation and the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary led Korda first to Vienna and then to Berlin, where his films enjoyed success. Then, after three dismal years in Hollywood, Korda moved to Britain in 1931.

His first British film was the quota quickie Service for Ladies (1932), soon followed by his first film for his own company, London Pictures, Wedding Rehearsal (1933), a film that established Korda's use of cherished national symbols in its opening shots of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, as well as his use of familiar national sterotypes amongst his characters. Following the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII, Korda continued to make lavishly produced biopics, such as The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Rembrandt (1936). Neither film came close to matching the commercial success of Henry VIII, although Rembrandt, featuring another memorable performance from Charles Laughton, who had won an Acdemy Award for his portrayal of Henry VIII, is considered by many critics to be Korda's finest directorial effort.

After the commercial failure of the latter two biopics, Korda turned his attentions to producing, running London Films as well as the large studio he had built at Denham. At the outbreak of World War II, Korda was back in the United States (some commentators have suggested he was there covertly on behalf of the British government). He returned to directing with That Hamilton Woman (also known as Lady Hamilton, 1941), a period piece about the affair between Admiral Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton that actually served as a propaganda film, with Napoleon established as an obvious parallel to Hitler. Korda's final two directorial efforts came after the war, with Perfect Strangers (1945) and the Oscar Wilde adaptation An Ideal Husband (1947). He died of a heart attack in London.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Director and Producer: Wedding Rehearsal (1933), The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Rembrandt (1936), The Lion Has Wings (1939), That Hamilton Woman (1941), An Ideal Husband (1947); As Producer: The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Drum (1938), The Four Feathers (1939)

JOHN GRIERSON AND THE
DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT

Parallel to the developments in feature filmmaking, another influential response to American dominance of British cinema emerged. The British documentary movement, led by the Scot, John Grierson (1898–1972), offered a distinctive riposte to Hollywood by focusing on fact and public information. While studying in the United States under a Rockefeller fellowship from 1923 to 1927, Grierson developed his interest in mass communication, in which he perceived the potential to educate the public and influence opinion. By making films that were not dependent upon box-office receipts, Grierson saw an opportunity to address social and political issues that were unlikely to be covered by the commercial film industry. At the same time, however, his reliance on government and industrial sponsors created restrictions on subject matter, and most of the films made under Grierson's auspices seem like public-relations exercises rather than cinema providing any sustained social or political analysis. Nonetheless, many critics see Grierson's influence as crucial in the development of British cinema. His approach to documentary filmmaking has positioned a "realist" orientation as one of the fundamental tenets of what is often identified as British cinema. This is in sharp contrast to some of the more escapist tendencies seen in many of the "prestige" productions of commercial cinema in Britain during the 1930s.

Grierson was the director of only one film, Drifters (1929), a documentary about herring fishing in the North Sea. In 1929 he helped set up the documentary film unit of the Empire Marketing Board under the direction of the board's secretary, Stephen Tallents. The development of such official and public-sector film units is a key component of Great Britain's cinema history and has served as a model for subsequent developments in both the public and private spheres. In 1933 the Empire Marketing Board was dismantled and the film unit was moved to the General Post Office. Following the outbreak of World War II, the unit was taken over by the Ministry of Information and became the Crown Film Unit. By 1940 Grierson was in Canada, where he helped found the National Film Board.

Despite its ties to the "real," the documentary film movement in Great Britain was in many ways an innovative form, concerned with aesthetics and a vital contributor to the development of an identifiable national cinema. With films such as Industrial Britain (1933), Grierson introduced a top-down, voice-of-god narration style whose purpose seemed to be public education. Industrial Britain was initially directed by Robert Flaherty, and Grierson had persuaded Gaumont-British to distribute the film. Unsatisfied with Flaherty's methods, however, particularly the American's tendencies toward lyrical images, Grierson took control of the film, shot additional material, and added the authoritative voice-over that is characteristic of his work. Two GPO films, Coal Face (1935), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982), and Night Mail (1936), directed by Harry Watt (1906–1987) and Basil Wright (1907–1987), make use of the poetry of W. H. Auden and the music of Benjamin Britten in an attempt to combine more formal aesthetic concerns in addition to addressing a sense of "Britishness." Two of the figures to emerge within the movement were Cavalcanti, who succeeded Grierson as director of the GPO unit in 1937, and Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950), whose early collaborations with Cavalcanti at the GPO were often criticized as too experimental. The Brazilian-born Cavalcanti had been involved with the French avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, while Jennings was a leading modernist and sur-realist with concurrent interests in painting, poetry, and theater, among other pursuits.

It was in his wartime documentaries that Jennings truly shone. His contributions to the Crown Film Unit's efforts are among the most memorable and critically discussed of the era. These include Listen to Britain (1942, with co-director Stewart McAllister), a film without commentary that instead relies upon associative montage to connect varied images through sounds, helping to create a sense of social cohesion through mass observation. Fires Were Started (1943) stretches the definition of documentary by presenting a fictional narrative shot in a documentary style so that it seems to capture the reality of London during the blitz. A Diary for Timothy (1945) comes after the end of the war but is without doubt a wartime documentary. The film uses the fictional diary of a baby, Timothy, who was born in 1944 and whose first year of life has been connected to the end of the war, to "observe" the nation while also addressing the future and reinforcing sense of community, the heart of all of Jennings's films.

WARTIME FEATURE FILM PRODUCTION

In 1940 Cavalcanti left the Crown Film Unit to become an associate producer and director at Ealing Studios. That such a key figure of the British documentary movement could operate within one of the country's emerging commercial production companies reinforces the influence that documentary realism was to have on the future of British cinema. After taking over as head of Ealing in 1938, Balcon had brought in a number of documentary filmmakers as part of his attempt to have the studio make films that would more accurately reflect the national character than had been the case before. Ealing was one of only three pre-war British studios to continue operating during the war, along with Korda's London Studios and Gainsborough. All three studios made films supporting the war effort and reinforcing a sense of community, largely through representing the lives of ordinary Britons in wartime. The film that perhaps best embodied this approach is the aptly titled Gainsborough production Millions Like Us (1943), scripted and directed by Launder and Gilliat. The film focuses primarily on a group of ordinary women who take wartime work in an airplane factory. The film employs numerous conventions drawn from documentary traditions and points to the increasing significance of social realism as a hallmark of British film. The importance of community and the everyday is also evident in Cavalcanti's Ealing film, Went the Day Well? (1942), in which a small Oxfordshire village is infiltrated by Nazis before the villagers realize it and strike back. The film's incorporation of idealized aspects of everyday village life, alongside moments of action and violence, reinforces the manner in which national character was being reflected.

While the turn toward realism is a significant aspect of British cinema in this period, it was not the only option pursued by producers or favored by audiences. It has been argued that critics championed realism, and hence it was films that corresponded to realist ideals that received the most critical acclaim, particularly in discussions related to a national cinema, both at the time and among the subsequent generation of scholars and critics. For filmgoers, though, the consensus was not so clear: Gainsborough made numerous popular escapist melodramas in this period. The theatricality favored by Korda in the 1930s had not entirely disappeared following the slump of the late 1930s. While the Gainsborough melodramas were frequently derided as too far-fetched, with settings either in exotic locales or a "fantasy" past, they did have a particular appeal for audiences, especially the female audience for which the war had brought a new economic and sexual independence. Stars such as James Mason (1909–1984) and Margaret Lockwood (1916–1990) came to embody aspects of sexual desire that were not being found elsewhere on British screens. The escapist, melodramatic nature of the wartime Gainsborough films was perhaps most evident in Madonna of the Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree, 1945), which is set in what is meant to be 1930s Florence but seems more an exotic admixture of southern European stereotypes and English mannerisms and accents. Despite its many contrivances, Madonna of the Seven Moons was a commercial success, indicating that British audiences were more than happy to indulge in artifice and escapism.

Key purveyors of such artifice were Michael Powell (1905–1990) and his collaborator Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988). Powell had already directed a number of quota quickies and low-budget features before first collaborating with Pressburger in 1939. While their early wartime propaganda features, such as 49th Parallel (1941), set in Canada and starring Laurence Olivier, helped establish their reputation, it was the more lavish spectacles they created for their own production company, The Archers, that truly made the pair vital figures in British cinema. The mysterious and spiritual A Canterbury Tale (1944), in which a group of modern-day pilgrims makes its way to Canterbury cathedral against the backdrop of World War II, demonstrated the pair's willingness to push boundaries both narratively and visually. In Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), Powell and Pressburger operated even more concretely within an expressionist mode of cinema; the former film was a sensual melodrama set in the Himalayas, while the latter was set in the world of ballet, where an ambitious young ballerina is torn between love and ambition.

Other "quality" films of the era reflected this dynamic between realist and expressionist modes of cinema. For example, a film that seems, at first glance, to be a "heritage" costume drama is Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), which uses the Shakespearean play to create a propaganda film. Henry's leadership of an English army defeating a European foe after crossing the English Channel had obvious parallels to events of the day, particularly the Normandy campaign. The film itself is dedicated "To the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain," making the ties even more explicit. Yet this Technicolor extravaganza also works well as a form of popular entertainment and taps quite effectively into the aspects of heritage Britain mined by Korda a decade earlier.

Henry V was produced by Two Cities films, a company that had come into being in 1937 and was guided by an Italian, Filippo Del Giudice. Not unlike the Hungarian-born Korda, Del Giudice was a non-Briton spearheading a company that primarily focused on making quintessentially British films. In order to secure adequate financing for the ambitious Henry V, Del Giudice allowed the Rank Organisation to obtain a controlling interest in Two Cities. It was one of numerous acquisitions made by the ever-expanding Rank company. The Rank Organisation, under the leadership of its founder J. Arthur Rank, was the dominant British film company throughout much of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s. By 1946 Rank's holdings included five studios, a number of production companies, a distribution arm, and more than 650 cinemas. Rank's vertical integration gave it a position of prominence in Britain comparable to the Hollywood majors in the US. Among the production companies that Rank acquired was Gainsborough in 1936. For the first decade Gainsborough was run relatively autonomously, but starting in 1946 Rank intervened more directly in the operations at the studio, and it slowly lost its autonomy as the Rank Organisation's consolidation began to point to an era where making films with wide appeal, rather than innovative films, would become an increasingly dominant trend.

POSTWAR FILM

The successes of the wartime cinema suggested that the cinema of Great Britain had reached a new level of maturity and was poised to flourish and possibly escape from the shadow of Hollywood. There were some notable successes, including two films adapted from Graham Greene (1904–1991) novellas. One, Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947), starred a young Richard Attenborough (b. 1923) as Pinky Brown, the teenaged leader of a gang of Brighton thugs. The second, The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed (1906–1976), was a thriller set in divided postwar Vienna and starred Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles; some have claimed it as the greatest British film of all time. Yet while the immediate postwar years held a great deal of promise, the cinema of that era did not necessarily live up to the expectations for it. By the 1950s the British market was effectively controlled by two firms, Rank and Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC). Additionally, cinema attendance declined from the peak of the war years. As indicated by Rank's increased intervention in Gainsborough, consolidation meant that costs could be reined in, so that while money was still lavished on quality films being made by bigger-name directors, the bulk of the company's output was material that would fill out programs in Rank-owned theaters. Rank also hoped to make greater inroads into the American market and saw the bigger-budgeted epics as a means of achieving this. A number of Britain's key directors in effect became independent contractors to Rank, and producing such films as Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and David Lean's (1908–1991) Brief Encounter along with his subsequent success, Great Expectations (1946).

Most key personnel left Gainsborough after Rank began his interference in 1946. Rank named Sydney Box the new head of Gainsborough, hoping that Box could continue the studio's commercially successful tradition of melodrama. Box, however, was more interested in social realism, and the period of Box's leadership, in which he was hampered by a myriad of organizational problems, saw a dramatic decline in the studio's box-office appeal until Rank closed Gainsborough in 1950. One key personnel move made by Box during his short tenure was the appointment of his sister, Betty Box (1915–1999), to head of production at Gainsborough's Islington studio. While she struggled under difficult conditions, Box established herself as a significant producer, and once Gainsborough closed, she continued to work for Rank at Pinewood Studios. Her biggest success was with Doctor in the House (1954), the first film in a long-running series. Doctor in the House starred Dirk Bogarde (1921–1999), whose success in the title role helped establish him as the "Idol of the Odeons." Bogarde dominated the British box office and popularity polls through much of the 1950s, reprising his Doctor role in three sequels as well as starring in another Betty Box–produced film, A Tale of Two Cities (1958), an adaptation of Dickens's novel. Bogarde's later career was marked by more serious roles, beginning with Victim (1961), the first British film to deal explicitly with homosexuality, and including Joseph Losey's (1909–1984) The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967).

Bogarde's popularity in the 1950s was tied to his involvement in genre films, which had become a commercial staple of the British market. Ealing Studios under Michael Balcon had emerged from the war with a continued focus on representing national character. The studio had a highly favorable financing and distribution deal with the Rank Organisation that afforded it a great deal of autonomy, so it was Balcon's personal vision that largely drove the studio. It was in the genre of comedy, and specifically the emergence of what came to be known as the "Ealing Comedy," where the studio truly flourished.

MICHAEL POWELL and EMERIC PRESSBURGER
Michael Powell, b. Bekesbourne, Kent, England, 30 September 1905, d. 19 February 1990
Emeric Pressburger, b. Miskolc, Austria-Hungary, 5 December 1902, d. 5 February 1988

As Britain's most famous producing-directing team, Powell and Pressburger divided critical opinion between those who demanded social realism within cinema and those who supported an auteurist vision. With the rise of auteur theory in journals such as the UK-based Movie, the work of Powell and Pressburger received a more positive critical reevaluation. At the box office, the duo's fantastical, mystical tales enjoyed great success.

A pair of propaganda films, 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), early in World War II won them admiration. In 1943 they established their own production company called the Archers, for which they made a succession of popular and significant films. The first was another propaganda film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), but as it was critical of the British military leadership, it was frowned upon by the War Office as well as by Winston Churchill.

A tale of modern-day pilgrims, A Canterbury Tale (1944) opens with a shot that suggests a Chaucerian past but then pans up to an airplane flying overhead. The film combines the duo's trademark stylistic flair with mysticism. That mysticism returned in "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), a romance shot in the Scottish islands with the war kept in the distant background. After the war the team continued to explore the exotic and fantastic with two classic melodramas, Black Narcissus (1947), about nuns establishing a religious community in the Himalayas, and The Red Shoes (1948), based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about a ballerina torn between the composer she falls in love with and her tyrannical balletmaster. Both films enjoyed international success and were a key part of the brief postwar boom in British cinema. After 1949 the pair began making films for Alexander Korda, and the Archers name disappeared. Although they had some moderate successes as they tried to help Korda crack the international market, their success was nowhere near that of the previous decade. The pair went their separate ways after Ill Met by Moonlight flopped in 1957.

Before teaming with Pressburger, Powell had directed the thriller Two Crowded Hours (1931), followed by numerous quota quickies. The producer Joe Rock then allowed Powell to make a film of his own choosing, The Edge of the World (1937), shot in the Scottish Hebrides, the locale to which he would return for "I Know Where I'm Going!". Following the end of his collaboration with Pressburger, Powell made the notorious Peeping Tom (1960). The negative reaction to his somewhat sympathetic portrayal of a sadistic killer all but ended Powell's career, though some critics later hailed the film as a masterpiece.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Powell: The Edge of the World (1937), Peeping Tom (1960); Powell and Pressburger: 49th Parallel (1941), One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), The Tales of Hoffman (1951)

THE 1960s AND 1970s

The year 1960 saw the release of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a film in which serial killer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) films his female victims, hoping to capture the expression of fear at the moment of their deaths. The film's addressing of issues such as voyeurism and sexuality, and its somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the killer, led to a harsh critical backlash against it; quite abruptly, the film all but ended Powell's career. Revisionist critics have hailed Peeping Tom as a disturbing masterpiece that cleverly addresses the voyeuristic impulses that drive cinema itself. Critical response aside, the film indicates that British cinema was not devoted solely to social realism. Boehm's Mark Lewis was one of a number of cinematic anti-heroes found in 1960s British cinema. Michael Caine's title character in Alfie (1966), a carefree womanizer, was another, earning him an Academy Award^® nomination.

The more positive response to Alfie may also have been part of a more open discussion of sexuality that was part of the dramatic social upheaval of the 1960s and points to the "swinging London" image that appeared in the latter half of the decade. A crucial musical influence on this era were The Beatles, and the overt adoration of them by their female fans has been considered by some commentators as one of the aspects of the sexual revolution. The Beatles were the focus of two films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), both directed by Richard Lester (b. 1932), and an animated feature, Yellow Submarine (1968), directed by George Dunning. The Lester films became a cultural phenomenon, particularly A Hard Day's Night, which combined the kinetic filming style and rapid-fire humor of the Carry On films with location shooting and other aspects of social realism.

While British popular cinema incorporated a range of styles throughout the 1960s, social realism was still significant during the entire decade as some of the young filmmakers to emerge in the late 1950s continued to mature in their work. Lindsay Anderson followed up on his 1950s Free Cinema documentaries with two key 1960s features. This Sporting Life (1963) starred Richard Harris (1930–2002) as a troubled rugby player. The film was shot in the area around Wakefield, Yorkshire, and Anderson's use of location and the authenticity in his evocation of working-class life makes this one of the most significant of the New Wave films. With If. … (1968), Anderson seemed to capture the zeitgeist. The figure of Malcolm McDowell (b. 1943) as a well-armed schoolboy atop the roof of the Cheltenham school (Anderson's own alma mater) offered a memorable image in a year rocked by student uprisings in the Western world. The impact of social realism was also evident in Ken Loach's (b. 1936) critically and commercially successful Kes (1969), the story of a working-class boy whose grim future prospects are alleviated as he gains personal satisfaction in learning to train and fly a kestrel. This was only Loach's second feature film, the first being Poor Cow (1967), but he had honed his skills working in television, making a number of films for BBC's The Wednesday Play. Loach's television success indicated the important role television was to have in nurturing British filmmakers. Numerous British films that were made for television saw theatrical release in other countries, even when they received no, or very limited, theatrical release in Britain. This has remained the case even with more recent Loach films such as The Navigators (2001), a drama focused on the plight of laborers within Britain's privatized railway system.

The 1970s have been viewed critically as yet another period of crisis within British cinema. Attendances continued to drop, Hollywood influence was significant, and the innovation and promise of the New Wave was becoming an increasingly distant memory. Yet there was still innovation and controversy too as censorship restrictions were further relaxed, opening up debates around the influence of cinema on society. One director who was clearly caught in this crossfire was Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999). Although American-born, Kubrick had taken up residence in the UK in order to make his films far from the reach of meddling studio heads. A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel, became a controversial touchstone for debates over cinema censorship and regulation. When a number of local authorities opted to ban the film after alleged "copycat attacks" mimicking the film's ultraviolent youth, Kubrick withdrew it from the British market. A unique quirk in the British regulatory system allows films that have approval from the British Board of Film Classification to be rejected by local authorities, as was the case with A Clockwork Orange and more recently, Canadian David Cronenberg's Crash (1996). An earlier controversy had erupted around The Devils (1971), directed by Ken Russell. Russell had already made cuts to appease the censorship board, but the film was still banned by a number of local authorities. Russell's tendency toward graphic cinematic displays made him one of the most notorious and interesting figures of the era. The reputation he had garnered for films such as Women in Love (1969), his adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novel, and The Music Lovers (1970), which focused on the sex life of the composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky and his wife, was cemented with the release of The Devils. This seemed to inspire Russell to pursue extravagance, such that his later films like Lisztomania (1975) and Valentino (1977) seem almost to be parodies of his earlier works, courting further controversy.

Another controversial figure was Nicolas Roeg (b. 1928), whose work was notably graphic at times but also, in structure, decidedly anticommercial and confrontational. Roeg first made a splash with Performance (1970), co-directed with Donald Cammell. The film follows a gangster on the run from the mob who takes refuge in the home of a reclusive rock star, played by Mick Jagger. Increasingly, the identities of the two men become blurred, both narratively and visually, as the film works constantly to disorient the spectator. Roeg's first solo film as director was Walkabout (1971), which follows three children lost in the Australian outback. This was followed by the taut psychological horror, Don't Look Now (1973), perhaps best remembered for its graphic conclusion. Roeg's later films have been somewhat uneven, and as is the case with Russell, he has had difficulty recapturing the level of critical acclaim he had enjoyed earlier in his career.

The ensemble crew of Monty Python also courted trouble with censorship bodies, particularly for parodying

the story of Christ in Life of Brian (1979). The film used the story of Brian, whose life parallels that of Christ, to provide typical "Monty Python" humor as it had been developed in their sketch television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974). The troupe's first cinematic effort, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), directed by Ian McNaughton, is a compilation of their television work. With Terry Jones as director, the troupe became more ambitious and cinematic by tying its unique brand of comedy to narrative, first in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), which was co-directed by Terry Gilliam; then Life of Brian; and finally Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983). The troupe employed absurdist humor, which at times could be quite graphic, as part of a broader satire of contemporary British society and mass culture more generally.

GLENDA JACKSON
b. Birkenhead, England, 9 May 1936

Glenda Jackson received her training at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art and commenced a stage career in 1957. Her first major stage success was her performance as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, a 1964 production by Peter Brook's Theatre of Cruelty; she recreated the role in the 1967 film version of the play. Jackson's intensity in her roles in the films of Ken Russell, which at the time pushed boundaries in popular cinema, brought her attention and admiration. She won her first Academy Award^® for Best Actress for her portrayal of Gudrun Brangwen in Russell's controversial adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel Women in Love (1969). She later portrayed Brangwen's mother, Anna, in Russell's adaptation of Lawrence's The Rainbow (1989).

Jackson gave a memorable performance, displaying intense physicality and sexuality, as Tchaikovsky's nymphomaniac wife in Russell's The Music Lovers (1970), yet she was also adept at comedy, winning her second Oscar^® for her performance in Melvin Frank's A Touch of Class (1973) alongside George Segal. In a memorable television role, Jackson cut a stunning figure by shaving her head to play Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC television miniseries Elizabeth R (1971), for which she won two Emmy Awards.

It is Jackson's repeated portrayals of strong women that helped make her stand out from among her contemporaries. Her theatrical training is evident in her willingness to devote herself wholly to each role she plays. In addition to her Emmy and Academy Award^® honors, Jackson has been nominated for Broadway's Tony Awards on four separate occasions. Other honors include being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1978 and having a theatre named in her honor in Birkenhead. Jackson's film career was preempted by her move into politics in 1992, when she became a member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate in London. She ran unsuccessfully for the position of mayor of London in 2000 but remains active in Labour Party politics. In May 2005 she was reelected MP for the fourth time.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Marat/Sade (1967), Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), A Bequest to the Nation (also known as The Nelson Affair, 1973), Hedda (1975), Turtle Diary (1985), The Rainbow (1989)

FROM THE 1980s TO THE PRESENT

If the 1970s saw the critical estimation of British cinema at a low ebb, then the tide rose very quickly at the beginning of the 1980s. The breakthrough commercial success for British cinema was Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), which follows the stories of two British athletes, Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), at the Paris Olympics in 1924. The film's Academy Award^® for Best Picture, followed by a win for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), suggested a resurgence for British cinema on the international stage. These two award-winning films were both epic period pieces that recalled the Korda era. Their success helped revitalize the industry, but the significant changes were occurring on a much smaller scale.

The most significant development was a shift in funding. It was the funding provided by Channel Four that seemed to bring new vitality to British cinema. It also brought an increased regional sensibility as funding was no longer concentrated in the hands of London-based producers. It was not only different regions but different underrepresented groups whose voices were finally becoming part of British cinema. As its name implies, Channel Four was the fourth terrestrial television channel launched in Britain, first appearing in 1982. In an effort to maintain its arts-focused mandate and to provide quality material for the channel, a separate films arm, Film on Four, was established. During the years of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments, which were not at all kind toward the arts, the money, support, and exhibition provided by Channel Four were vital to the British film community.

A number of key films, and key figures, in British cinema of the 1980s and 1990s emerged as a result of the Films on Four funding. Among the first successes of the program were Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982); Neil Jordan's Angel (1982); and Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), written by Hanif Kureishi. My Beautiful Laundrette suggested the potential of the Channel Four films to uncover new voices within British cinema. Kureishi's script, which explores the burgeoning gay relationship between two men, one white and one Pakistani, opens up many questions around identity in Britain and highlighted some of the difficulties that second-generation immigrants had in negotiating between cultural traditions and a British way of life. A number of key films emerged in the following two decades that explored the South Asian diasporic experience. Among these were Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1993), which uses an outing to a typical British seaside resort to focus on the experiences of Asian women of different generations; the comedic, yet touching East Is East (1999), directed by Damien O'Donnell and based on the semiautobiographical play by Ayub Khan-Din; and Bend it Like Beckham (2002), which continues Chadha's exploration of gender issues in its focus on an Asian girl who would rather play soccer than learn traditional Indian cooking methods.

Other cultural groups in Britain have also found filmic means of making their voices heard. In 1983 a

group of black independent filmmakers established the production collective Sankofa. With funding from the Greater London Council (a progressive political body disbanded by Margaret Thatcher in 1986) and Channel Four, the members of Sankofa sought ways of telling stories employing their own cultural voices. The most notable member of the collective has been Isaac Julien (b. 1960), whose early films for the group included Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983); Territories (1985); and his meditation on the gay, black American poet Langston Hughes, Looking for Langston (1988). With funding from the BFI, Julien was able to make his debut feature, Young Soul Rebels (1991), a thriller that offers a rather idealistic portrait of racial togetherness among London's various music subcultures in the late 1970s.

Funding through bodies such as Channel Four and the BFI kept British filmmakers independent of Thatcherism and more recently of the New Labour ideals of Tony Blair. The filmmakers' response was films that were largely critical of the dominant vision of Britain. These films began to break the hegemonic representation of Britishness that had dominated the national cinema by opening up issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. This is not to say that there have not been investments made in more commercial cinema. FilmFour, as Film on Four came to be called in the 1990s, invested in international hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, directed by Mike Newell). The "heritage" film also became a major staple of British popular cinema and a successful international export. A number of Ismail Merchant (1936–2005) and James Ivory (b. 1928) coproductions were staple fare for this genre. The Ivory-directed A Room with a View (1985) followed on the heels of Chariots of Fire and Gandhi and helped to establish the key stylistic parameters for the genre. Later successful heritage films such as Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1998) and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998), another Oscar^® winner for Best Picture, helped to cement the reputation of this area of British cinema.

In contrast to these versions of heritage Britain, the trend toward social realism has remained strong in many of the smaller British films that have been made in recent decades. Among the filmmakers who have consistently

employed this strategy has been Mike Leigh (b. 1943). Leigh's first feature was Bleak Moments (1971), but subsequently he turned to television, where his improvisational methods were more readily funded. He worked there until making his second feature, High Hopes, in 1988. Yet another film supported by Channel Four, as well as British Screen, the film is a family drama that is used as a poignant rejoinder to the consumerism spawned by Thatcherism. Leigh's focus on the working class continued in a series of social realist films, including Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), and Career Girls (1997). All of these films focused on contemporary Britain, but Leigh demonstrated his ability to explore similar themes around class and British society employing historical subjects, as in Topsy-Turvy (1999), which examines the world of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Vera Drake (2004), which examines abortionist Drake's clash with British society in the 1950s.

While the films of the 1960s New Wave had focused on Britain's working class, more recent films have traced the lives of the underclass, former members of the working class who have been left behind in the new, technological economy during the reigns of Thatcher and Blair. Films such as Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1997), Mark Herman's Brassed Off (1996) and Little Voice (1998), and Carine Adler's Under the Skin (1997), along with the continued work of Ken Loach, explore the desperate attempts at survival for those who have been cut off from Britain's economic boom. While such films offer positive moments, their use of location shooting and devout attention to detail do much to reveal the dark underbelly of Britain's current success.

Since the winding down of Channel Four's funding of films in 2002, the funding model in Great Britain has continued to evolve. The UK Film Council was set up in 2000 by the Labour government. The role of the council is to dispense money raised via the National Lottery to nine different regional screen agencies in England as well as the Welsh Development Agency, Scottish Enterprise, and the Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland, each of which administers its own film-funding initiatives. The result is an increased regional diversification within British cinema.

SCOTLAND AND WALES

While earlier efforts such as those of the New Wave in the 1960s had moved their focus beyond London and the Home Counties, the regionalism on offer extended north to cities such as Nottingham but still remained predominantly English in nature. With the emergence of alternative funding bodies such as Channel Four, and more recently the National Lottery, a greater awareness of regionalism has become necessary for any understanding of British cinema. It is nearly impossible today to conceive of one single cinema of Great Britain.

Scotland as a setting has been employed in numerous British films, notably Ealing films such as The Maggie and Whisky Galore!. It has of course also featured in the telling of Scottish legends, such as those of Shakespeare's Macbeth or Rob Roy. Additionally, Scotland provided a number of key figures to the British industry, among them John Grierson. An indigenous Scottish film industry, however, took far longer to develop. While much of the UK and Ireland prospered from the shifting economy of the 1980s and 1990s, former industrialized areas in Britain's north—particularly in Scotland—and in parts of Wales, where heavy industry and mining had been dominant industries, struggled immensely. Using cinema to voice the concerns of underrepresented contemporary Scots was a significant breakthrough. One director who managed to do so successfully was Bill Forsyth (b. 1946). After having made short documentaries, Forsyth directed his first feature, That Sinking Feeling (1980), about a group of unemployed Glasgow youth involved in a robbery of stainless steel sinks. This was followed by Gregory's Girl (1981), which used a social realist aesthetic and a tale of adolescent love to explore life in Scotland's postwar "new towns." Perhaps Forsyth's most successful film was the low-key comedy, Local Hero (1983), produced by David Puttnam. The film evoked the humor of the Ealing comedies as it explored the clash between contemporary consumerism, represented by an American oil company, and traditional Scottish values, represented by a local fishing village. Forsyth later spent time working in the United States before returning to Scotland to make Gregory's Two Girls (1999), a sequel to Gregory's Girl.

Restless Natives (1985), produced by Channel Four and directed by an American, Michael Hoffman, is a film that essentially modernizes the myth of Rob Roy. It follows two Edinburgh youth who, cut off from the new economy, turn to robbing the tour buses that seem now to dominate their landscape, only to find that their exploits become a bigger tourist draw than any scenery the Highlands has to offer. The main characters of Restless Natives are possibly the comedic predecessors of the youth of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), a film adapted from a stage play that itself was adapted from a novel by Irvine Welsh. The film's dry wit, its harrowing portrayal of heroin abuse among the disenfranchised youth of Edinburgh, its contemporary soundtrack, and Boyle's slick shooting style resulted in Trainspotting becoming one of the main exports of mid-1990s "Cool Brittania"—this despite the fact that its extensive use of working-class Scottish slang and authentic dialect meant that it had to be offered with subtitles in many other English-speaking markets (particularly the United

States). Another film that required subtitles was Ratcatcher (1999), directed by the photographer-turned film maker Lynne Ramsay (b. 1969). Set during a garbage strike in Glasgow of the 1970s, the film's use of local dialect, along with its attempts to make use of costume and other authentic historic elements, make the film an ironic sort of heritage film, uncovering a heritage that official Britain may prefer be left forgotten.

Perhaps Wales's biggest claim to film culture has been in the figures that it has exported to Hollywood, including the likes of Richard Burton (1925–1984), Anthony Hopkins, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The Welsh industry has been small and itself is split between English-language films made in Wales and Welsh-language films that have, understandably, a very limited audience. Likely the most popular Welsh-language film of all time is Hedd Wyn (1992), directed by Paul Turner, which was nominated for an Academy Award^® for Best Foreign Language film. Endaf Emlyn (b. 1944) directed the Welsh-language feature Gadael Lenin (Leaving Lenin, 1993), a film that explored relationships among a group of Welsh youth on a school trip to Russia. Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic (1999) captures the youthful vibrancy of contemporary Cardiff. Only one of the film's main characters possesses a Welsh accent; the rest are from various other parts of the UK. In this way, Kerrigan is able to address the changing nature of the Welsh capital as it has become a key center of technological development and has undergone a boom that has transformed it from a Welsh city to a UK city. Other films have focused on the Welsh underclass. Twin Town (1997), directed by Kevin Allen, is in the British underclass film tradition in its representation of a dysfunctional working-class family in Swansea.

Given an increased focus on regional filmmaking, a migratory and multicultural population, the ever-increasing economic significance of the European Union, and the growth of co-productions as part of the global cinema market, any secure definitions of what constitutes a British cinema can no longer exist. Instead, Great Britain can now be seen as a significant cinema center where a multitude of voices can be found.