Abstracts

Chris Auld (Manchester) ‘Quatermass and the canon: a critical re-appraisal of the 1950s Hammer
Quatermass films’.

The proposed paper addresses the 1950s Quatermass films (The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2
(1957), produced by Hammer, and their television counterparts. Despite the assertion that Hammer horror
productions were “initiated by the enormous commercial success” (Hutchings, 1993: 25) of the Quatermass films,
they have not been afforded the critical recognition they merit. The legacy of these films can be seen in the
fortunes of British cinema throughout the 1960s, and the development of screen science fiction in Britain. The
paper reassesses the cultural importance of the Quatermass phenomenon.

The recent study British Horror Cinema, (Chibnall and Petley eds. 2002), refers to a resurgence of interest in
British horror, which, while welcome, still focuses on a perceived canon. Though hitherto neglected films have
been re-discovered, the Quatermass films have not enjoyed comparable critical space. The present literature
focuses on Hammer and Gothic films (Pirie, [1973], Hutchings [1993]), or genre studies of horror within national
cinema (Street [1997], Murphy, [1997]). While Pirie devoted single chapters to the Frankenstein and Dracula
cycles, the Quatermass films only received several pages’ coverage. Similarly, Hutchings assesses Quatermass
productions within discussion of transitional phases in British cinema. Rather than meriting their own study, the
Quatermass films are considered as the development towards Hammer’s more familiar output. My study re-
examines the Quatermass films and their cultural significance in prompting the later, more lauded canon, and
questions their critical neglect.

The hybridity of the films, containing both science fiction and horror elements, are considered as possible factors
contributing to their critical neglect. Issues of television to film adaptation are similarly explored, particularly the
possibility that the non-literary origin of the Quatermass films may have contributed to their neglect. The paper
therefore addresses issues of canon formation and value judgement toward television in the 1950s. Textual
analyses will read the films and their aesthetics for specific themes, principally the uncanny through post-war/post-
colonial anxiety. Finally, the legacy of the films will be considered, their lasting influence and impact on British
horror/science fiction and subsequent re-makes.

Charles Barr (Visiting Professor of Film and Media at Washington, University in St Louis) ‘A Rediscovery
of Cinema: Thorold Dickinson and the development of Film Studies in the UK.’

My title invokes that of Thorold Dickinson's most substantial critical work, A Discovery of Cinema, published by
OUP in 1971; he wrote the introduction from the Slade School in 1970, after a decade of teaching there, and the
book stands as a judicious summing up of a varied career as film-maker, critic and teacher, then drawing to a close.
On the analogy of the Maoist concept of the continuing revolution, I see his engagement with cinema as involving
a continuing process of re-discovery; that is what makes his work, and his legacy, so fresh and fertile.

Melanie Bell-Williams (Newcastle) ‘Divergent femininity at the cultural margins: the figure of the prostitute
in 1950s British Cinema’

Female sexuality was a subject of considerable debate in Britain in the 1950s with women’s sexual behaviour
discussed in numerous popular publications ranging from the Penguin handbook The Art of Marriage (1957) to the
National Marriage Guidance Council’s leaflet How to Treat a Young Wife. Despite this, mainstream British
cinema largely refused to engage with changes in women’s sexual lives, preferring instead to offer audiences
family comedies and war films. This paper argues that it was B-features and their representation of the female
prostitute that offered a working through of ideas relating to new forms of femininity and female sexuality.
Drawing on the 1957 Wolfenden Report and its attempts to distinguish between prostitutes and ‘ordinary’ women,
this paper will discuss two low-budget X-rated films where the prostitute figure is central: The Flesh is Weak
(1957) and Passport to Shame (1959). Through an analysis of domestic space and the female body I will argue
that the representation of the prostitute throws light both on new forms of female sexuality and wider changes to
the social fabric occurring in British culture at this time. Rather than read these films as social problem texts
(Dyer, 1993; Hill, 1986) I suggest it is more productive to understand them as examples of the ‘woman’s film’,
and explore evidence that points to their popularity with female audiences.
Linnie Blake (MMU) ‘The Chatsworth Estate as Garden of Eden: Screening Manchester as New Labour
Utopia’

In the last ten years the social, cultural and economic regeneration of Manchester that occurred in the wake of
2005’s IRA’s bomb has been explored and interrogated by a plethora of visual narratives that take the city and its
people as their subject. I am thinking here of films such as East is East and 24 Hour Party People, television
comedies such as The Royle Family and Early Doors, series dramas such as Cold Feet, Queer as Folk, Shameless
and Cutting It. Thus as urban spaces are regenerated and urban identities are purportedly refashioned, these
narratives can be seen to respond visually, narratologically and ideologically to New Labour’ s will to revision the
industrial past in its own image, as indeed it has fashioned the Labour party in service of its own anti-socialist
agenda.

Thus pastiching both the British New Wave’s purposefully realist cinematic depiction of the industrial culture of
the North West and the narrative conventions, plot dynamics and character archetypes of the television soap (most
specifically those of Coronation Street, the region’s most longstanding piece of exported self-representation), these
narratives screen Manchester as a hybridised urban space, where competing models of regional (and in turn
national) identity coexist peacefully and unproblematically. Hence, Finn, the self-made loft-dwelling club-owning
yuppie of Cutting It, is depicted as being every bit as Mancunian as Frank Gallagher, Shameless’s vocationally
unemployed, E-popping, alcoholic father of eight. Whether the specific site at which Mancunian identity is
contested is the Castlefield basin’s converted mills and regenerated canals or the graffitied walkways and precinct
pubs of the fictive Chatsworth Estate, the Manchester screened here is not only instantly recognisable but it offers
a inherently appealing, because insistently de-politicised (and hence de-problematised) vision of contemporary
British social life.

This paper will illustrate how (deploying a bricolage of partly cinematic and partly televisual generic conventions
and drawing on a range of ready-made popular cultural stereotypes of the region) recent televisual representations
of Manchester undertake an ostensibly carnivalesque celebration of the city’s polymorphously perverse present
whilst nostalgically propounding an historically revisionist re-working of the region’s industrial past and the
culture of individual authenticity, familial strength and community solidarity that past engendered. Occluding the
political radicalism of the Mancunian people as effectively as New Labour erased the socialist origins of the
Labour Party, and fetishising the entrenched poverty that continues to characterise much of the city, these
narratives thus give us a Blairite Utopia, a Manchester of the New Labour mind that for all its nostalgic appeal to a
mass audience merely reiterates the essentially Thatcherite belief that the class war is over, society does not exist
and individuals (and their families) are happy with their lot.

Steve Blandford (Glamorgan) ‘Postcolonial Identity and Amma Asante’s film A Way of Life’

I would like to propose a paper that uses Amma Asante’s film A Way of Life as the main focus of how
contemporary cinema in Wales and, to some extent Scotland and Ireland, has begun to open up questions around
postcolonial identity at the British ‘margins’.

Asante’s film centres on a racist murder in the South Wales Valleys and raise vital and interesting questions about
not only race, but gender as components of contemporary Welsh identity. A Way of Life will be examined in the
context of other examples of recent British cinema such as Ken Loach’s Ae Fair Kiss which draws on the diverse
ethnicity of contemporary Glasgow in the post 9/11 in order to understand some of the ways that cinema is seeking
to make sense of a fracturing British identity.

The paper will also attempt to make connections with other recent work by Charlotte Williams, Glenn Jordan and
others that seeks to understand the meaning of race and ethnicity in contemporary Wales, particularly in the light
of recent hotly contested versions of the relevance to Wales of postcolonial theory. To date this body of work
rarely touches on cinema specifically and this paper seeks to begin to make such connections mainly, though not
exclusively through asserting the importance of Asante’s film and its very high profile critical reception.

Paul Booth (MMU) 'Rave New World - Aesthetic representation’

In this paper I intend to examine the British feature film 28 Days Later (Dir. Danny Boyle 2002) as allegory for
post-rave culture in the UK. As stated by Baudrillard (1982) ‘nothing could better signify the complete
disappearance of a culture of meaning and aesthetic sensibility than a spinning of strobe lights and gyroscopes
streaking the space whose moving pedestal is crated by the crowd’
It is my assumption that Baudrillard had prophesised the decline of rave culture, due to the rise in mainstream
dance culture. As the biggest youth subculture of the last 20 years rave culture represented freedom and liberation
from the conservative government through its hedonistic pleasures and its unassuming neo-tribalistic formations,
stated by Bennet (2000) ‘as a way to describe the shifting and fluid nature of collective associations between
young people and the associated tendencies of youth to move between different sites of consumption (that is, to
associate more with a mix of cultural spaces and less with stable class/race/gender defined groups).’ 28 Days Later
depicts neo-tribalism and the hegemonic divide representative of the shift in rave and dance culture through its
inception during the Thatcher government to its decline under Blair’s Labour government.

Technically this marks an important turning point for the production team of 28 Days Later, who have heavily
used rave culture as a central backdrop and as an aesthetic to win audiences with previous films such as
Trainspotting (Boyle 1996) and The Beach (Boyle 2000). 28 Days Later finally puts the lid on rave culture and
reflects the need of youth culture to move on. Textually, characters, space and environment are representative of
British inner city-rave aesthetics and the drug experience of the rave culture scene.

Martin Carter (Sheffield Hallam) ‘Pen Tennyson – a Lost Treasure’

The 1930s has often been seen as an inauspicious decade for British Cinema; for many it is redeemed only by
Hitchcock and Korda. It is, therefore, a mystery how a figure such as Pen Tennyson has fallen into virtual
obscurity since the 1950s. Tennyson made three feature films in as many years (There Ain’t No Justice (1938), The
Proud Valley (1939) and Convoy (1940)) before his tragic early death in a plane crash while on active service in
1941. His career is a virtual pocket-history of British Cinema in the 1930s: an assistant to Victor Saville, then an
assistant director with Hitchcock, continuing on to work on a number of big-budget Anglo-American co-
productions before being given an opportunity to direct his first feature by his constant mentor, Michael Balcon.

Tennyson himself is full of contradictions. Born into a comfortable upper-middle class family (he was the
grandson of the great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson) his early life is almost a parody of a pampered and privileged
upbringing: Eton, Oxford and a job in the film industry gained through his parents’ connections. The journey that
this naïve dilettante then makes finds him, in 1941, a passionate advocate of nationalising the cinema and doing
away with all the commercial aspects of filmmaking. His feature films illustrate his education in both cinema and
life, and are three very individual pieces of work that show the huge potential Tennyson possessed. None of his
films could be described as complete successes, each is compromised by both budgetary limitations and the social
sensibilities of the time, however all three display a sensitivity and dignity towards their working-class characters
that is unique in dramatic films of this period.

Frederick Penrose Tennyson is a figure ripe for re-discovery and re-evaluation and his career a fascinating insight
into how the British film industry worked during the 1930s.

James Caterer (UEA) ‘”Carrying a cultural burden”: British Film Policy and its Products.’

Andrew Kötting’s esoteric documentary Gallivant (1996) is a journey through British geography and culture
which was made with contributions from the BFI Production Board, Channel Four and the Arts Council of
England’s National Lottery fund, and was also chosen by the London Film-Maker’s Co-op to open the new
Lottery-funded Lux Cinema. In this light, Margaret Dickinson’s comment that the film “reaches the public
carrying a cultural burden”, opens up a series of issues surrounding the nature of public patronage and its effects,
both upon the cultural artefacts which it helps to create and the ways in which they are interpreted by critics and
audiences.

This paper uses the idea of Gallivant’s “cultural burden” as a starting point to investigate the complex relationship
between film policy and its end products. It draws on a range of examples from the history of public interventions
in the British film industry, including the ‘quota quickies’ of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of John Grierson’s
state film units, and the ‘Free Cinema’ films made with the help of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund in the
1950s. The most recent government initiative, National Lottery funding for film production, has sparked
considerable debate around the purposes of public support for cinema. Certain films have unwittingly become
flash points for these debates, particularly Beautiful Creatures (2001) and Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004). But
how should we consider the entire range of cinematic activity funded by this mechanism? Is it meaningful to
describe a film as ‘Lottery-funded’? Does only a certain type of film, such as the art house experiment Gallivant,
carry this “cultural burden”, or is it also taken up by bigger budget comedies and heritage films? Is this ‘burden’
necessarily problematic, or can it also be advantageous? Finally, is it possible to make connections between policy
discourses and their end products, the texts themselves, and how do these texts then feed back into future policy
decisions?

James Chapman (Leicester) ‘Re-presenting War: British TV drama-documentary and the Second World
War’

This paper examines a recent cycle of British television drama-documentaries focusing on the events of the Second
World War: Dunkirk (BBC2, 2004), D-Day (BBC2, 2004), When Hitler Invaded Britain (ITV1, 2004), D-Day to
Berlin (BBC2, 2005) and Blitz: London’s Firestorm (Channel 4, 2005). It argues that they represent a distinct
production cycle on account of their similar subject matter and their stylistic similarities. They represent nothing
less than a new aesthetic and formal strategy for dramatising the events of the Second World War, combining
dramatic reconstruction with oral history and archival footage in new and innovative ways. In particular they
merge conventions from the lineages of the drama serial (paradigmatic example A Family at War) and the
documentary series (paradigmatic example The World at War) which had previously followed separate
trajectories. In breaking down the accepted conventions of historical representation (for example in freely
intermixing actuality film and reconstruction) these series exemplify what Robert A. Rosenstone has termed ‘the
New History Film’, i.e. one that finds space to contest received history and assumptions about historical
knowledge. This is also demonstrated in their ‘revisionist’ perspective on the events of the war – a perspective
that, particularly in the case of Dunkirk, provoked controversy for ‘debunking’ some of the ‘myths’ of the Second
World War.

This paper is in three parts: 1. To situate the cycle in the context of the British television industry in the early
twenty-first century, especially the competing demands of international co-production partners; 2. To analyse their
formal and aesthetic strategies; and 3. To consider the extent to which they offer new insights into the British
historical experience of the Second World War.

Steve Chibnall, (De Montfort) ‘British Screens – Then: Film Publicity Campaigns 1928-1939’

In November this year, the BFI are due to publish British Film Posters by Sim Branaghan, the first history of the
promotion of films in this country. I acted as academic advisor and editor on this book, and contributed additional
research on the inter-war period. This paper is based on that research, and traces the process of transition from
campaigns based on the adaptation of Hollywood designs to a more sophisticated advertising culture in which the
origination of promotional ideas, logos and artwork was common.

This transition was occasioned by, and reflects, the growing proportion of indigenous films on British screens
brought about by the 1927 Films Act, a protectionist measure that was successful in increasing the British share of
the home market from less than five to almost twenty-five per cent in ten years. What role did film poster
campaigns play in this renaissance of British cinema? Which agencies were responsible for their design and
implementation? How were distinctive identities created for individual pictures?

The final part of the paper will look at how, in the late 1930s, this process of cultural identity creation culminated
in the popularisation of a poster format unique to British film publicity: the landscape format, 30” x 40” Quad. The
Quad poster has remained the dominant form for the past six decades, and is only now being challenged by
multiplex exhibition practices frustrated by its nationally-specific identity.

The paper will be extensively illustrated by scans of poster campaigns of the period selected from my own archive
of British press books.

Pamela Church-Gibson (University of the Arts, London) ‘Postwar Paranoia, The end of empire and the
Genesis of the Heritage Film’

British cinema in the post-war period reflected the problems of a nation struggling to come to terms with its new,
diminished status. The swift appearance of films set in the Second World War, only just concluded, which
displayed British fortitude and pluck, was one clear indication of the awareness of change and the need to parade
the past. Far more interesting - and seemingly ignored by scholarship- are two films made in the early fifties which
can arguably be seen as the genesis of the 'heritage film'. Powell and Pressburger chose to film one of Baroness
Orczy's deeply reactionary novels, The Elusive Pimpernel, which was both a critical and commercial failure. It is,
however, historically interesting, not only for its anti-French sentiments but - more significantly - for its portrayal
of the early nineteenth century upper-class milieu and its loving depiction of the English landscape. Certain proto-
heritage features can be perceived - as perhaps is the case with the renewed interest in the mythical figure of Robin
Hood. Although it is his televised adventures which seem to remain in the collective memory, the fact that a
feature film was made, at this particular historical juncture, which showed off the exploits of this indigenous hero
seems highly significant.

Lez Cooke (MMU Cheshire) ‘Television/Theatre/Cinema: Regional (Screen) Culture in Stoke-on-Trent’

Between 1967 and 1974 Peter Cheeseman’s Victoria Theatre Company, based in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire,
produced four dramas for television. Each one was produced by a different Midlands-based regional television
company: ABC, ATV, BBC Midlands and BBC English Regions Drama. Taken together the four plays provide a
case study in regional television drama production in the 1960s-70s, illustrating the ways in which a regionally-
based theatre company, immersed in the social life and culture of the Potteries, collaborated with regionally-based
television companies in a manner which has largely disappeared in the more globally-oriented television market of
the 21st century. This paper will examine these collaborative ventures in the context of regional culture in Stoke-
on-Trent, linking these historical TV artefacts to the continuing cultural work of Stoke Film Theatre where, at two
events in 2004 and 2005, members of the Victoria Theatre Company reassembled for screenings of two of the
television dramas they had produced more than thirty years ago.

David Deamer (MMU) ‘Deleuze and the British Screen’

British cinema has existed in an almost perpetual state of crisis since the heady days of primary innovation came to
an end around 1906. The pantheon of British directors with a sustained corpus of great work who did not turn to
the American cinema for sustenance is small, an issue concentrating the complexity of just what British cinema is
and just who is a British director.

This narrative of British cinema is mirrored in the cinema books of Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on
cinema-philosophy – Cinema 1: the Movement-Image (1984) and Cinema 2: the Time-Image (1985). Hitchcock is
in there and is (as could be expected) a pivotal figure. Joseph Losey is also is given a place. However, Hitchcock
worked predominately in America and Losey was an American who (arguably) directed his finest films in Britain.
And that is about it… apart from cursory mentions of Terence Fisher, Carol Reed and Ken Russell; and the
American directors Lewin and Kubrick who made – what could be called – ‘British’ films. No mention of Powell
and Pressburger, Anderson, Reisz, Richardson, Roeg nor Grierson, amongst others.

However, British cinema has had its revenge for Deleuze’s lacuna. It ignored him, British academics and
filmmakers seeing his books as either outside the standard academic paradigm of the (broadly speaking)
structuralist-Marxist-psychoanalytic regime or, more often, too difficult. Until recently, that is.

This paper attempts to avoid a discussion of what British cinema is and who is a British director. Rather it attempts
to concentrate upon individual films emerging as British and exploring them through the productive taxonomy of
Deleuze’s work to open up a way forward for a Deleuzian engagement with British Screens past, present and
future.

K.J.Donnelly (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) ‘The New Gold Dream: the British Musical Screen, 1964,
1967, 1985, 1996, ?’

Some notable moments when British cinema has been at its most buoyant have coincided with periods when the
music industry in Britain has also been at its strongest. Indeed, predating the advent of synchronized sound, there
has been a zone of British cinema that might be approached merely as an emanation from the music industry. It
includes, but is far from confined to, film musicals. Such key moments of intersection include the 'Beat Boom' in
1964-5, British psychedelia in 1967-8, the 'New Romantics' in 1984-6 and 'Britpop' in 1996-8. On two of these
occasions, pop music staged a 'British Invasion' of the American market (mid 60s, mid 80s), while in the late 90s
the bridgehead seemingly failed.
Some of the films that will be under discussion will include A Hard Day's Night (1964), Catch Us if You Can
(1965), Up the Junction (1967), Wonderwall (1968), A View to a Kill (1985), Absolute Beginners
(1986),Trainspotting (1996) and A Life Less Ordinary (1997). This paper will investigate some key moments,
where British cinema engage with a more successful area of British culture. Pre-eminent international sales of
British pop music arguably came to dictate cinema, in terms of production, aesthetics and logic at these historical
junctures. The conclusion of the argument is that we can expect such buoyancy in the film industry at moments in
the future where British pop music is particularly strong.

Sally Dux (Open University) ‘Richard Attenborough and the British Cinema 1969-2000’

This paper focuses on the films as a director of Richard Attenborough and their place in British cinema history.
Although Attenborough has played a significant role in the British cinema since his acting screen debut in In
Which we Serve (1942) arguably his greatest success has been as a director, most notably with Gandhi (1982),
which gained eight Academy Awards. Despite Gandhi’s success however, Attenborough has directed he has
received only scant recognition as a director. I will aim to demonstrate the reasons for this neglect with an
appraisal of his films.

All of Attenborough’s films (with the exception of the American fiction films, Magic and A Chorus Line) are
historically based, seven of which are biographical portrayals. The ‘biopics’ range from the political, Young
Winston (1972), (Winston Churchill) Gandhi (1982), the anti-apartheid ‘dual’ biography, Cry Freedom (1987),
(Donald Woods and Steve Biko) the literary, Shadowlands (CS Lewis) and In Love and War, (Ernest Hemingway)
and those concerning ‘actors,’ (Chaplin 1992) (Charles Chaplin) and the false identity portrayed in Grey Owl,
(Archie Belaney). The other favoured genre of Attenborough’s is the war film, which he uses as a vehicle to
expose his own anti-war feelings. Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), which exposed the folly of war and A Bridge
Too Far (1976) which highlighted the flaws of the Allied assault at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944.

These genres are linked to Attenborough’s particular fascination with people and their interactions.
Attenborough’s approach to films is also based on his personal philosophy ranging from his upbringing (his
parents’ radical opinions and social awareness), his own political leanings (socialist/liberal) and his wartime
experiences. His policy of ‘abhorring the politics of sex and violence’ dominates his films and points towards a
more middlebrow/middleclass appeal suggesting comparisons with the ‘respectable’ and ‘quality’ traditions of
British film culture. The perceived culture and aesthetic conservatism of his films, furthermore is a reason why
Attenborough has been hitherto less critically regarded than other, comparable, British directors including David
Lean and Ken Loach.

Richard Farmer (UEA) ‘The Black Market in British Wartime Cinema’

Although a good deal of interesting work has been carried out on the subject of spivs, racketeers and criminality in
post-war British cinema, relatively little scholarship has looked at the way in which the Black Market was
presented in wartime feature films.

Films such as Waterloo Road (1945) and The Third Man (1948) present their criminal protagonists in an
ambiguous manner which speaks of unsettled contemporary attitudes regarding the government’s right to dictate
consumption patterns in the last months of the war and the immediate post-war period. Such ambiguities are
largely absent from wartime films, but this is not to say that their uncomplicated condemnation of criminality
restricts their usefulness.

This paper will examine the different ways in which British filmmakers mobilised the idea of the Black Market
during the Second World War. By analysing three “low comedies” – Gert and Daisy Clean Up (1942), Old
Mother Riley Detective (1943) and Up With the Lark (1943) – and one thriller – The Hundred Pound Window
(1944) – we will see that the Black Market was considered to be a suitable topical backdrop for formulaic, and, in
the case of the comedies, episodic narratives.

These films can also be understood as attempts to reinforce the collective identity of wartime Britain. Issues of
class, gender and community are all prominent, and were used to position the racketeers outside the boundaries of
the “gastronomic community,” by which I mean the group as defined by the common diet imposed by rationing.
Discussing these films in the social and economic contexts of wartime Britain, the paper will analyse the complex
relationships that existed between cinema, rationing and the criminal phenomenon of the Black Market. However,
we will see that there is an irony inherent in a series of films that condemn and counter the actions of wartime
spivs and racketeers whilst simultaneously proclaiming the existence – and, in some cases, the glamour – of the
Black Market.

Sheldon Hall (Sheffield Hallam) ‘Roadshows and Reissues: Refiguring the ultimate film.’

In 2004, the British Film Institute sponsored a six-hour Channel 4television programme entitled THE ULTIMATE
FILM, a survey of the 100 allegedly most popular (in terms of cinema admissions) films shown in Britain since
1930. The following year, bfi Publishing issued a book of the same title, updating the "all-time hits" list. Neither
TV show nor book explains how the figures for attendance were arrived at in the absence of hard data for films
released in the years before 1970. This paper examines both the bfi/C4 survey and the broader issue of appropriate
methodologies of research for film historians trying to determine the popularity of individual films. In particular, it
will address how exceptional popularity could be achieved by the film industry in the pre-multiplex era, with
special attention paid to two categories of release: the "roadshow" method, commonly used for "blockbusters" until
the mid-1970s; and multiple reissues of successful films over several decades. Central to the paper is the argument
that film popularity cannot be properly understood or explained without detailed reference to historically specific
patterns of distribution, exhibition and marketing.

Stuart Hanson (De Montfort) ‘The multiplex and the megaplex: cinema exhibition in Britain; past, present
and future.’

In 1985 Britain’s first purpose built multiplex cinema, The Point, opened in Milton Keynes, setting in train a series
of developments and radically altering the landscape of cinema exhibition in the United Kingdom. In 1998 the
number of multiplex screens exceeded the number of screens in traditional cinemas for the first time, whilst in
2004 there were some 238 multiplex cinemas open for business. Multiplexes are a new kind of cinema; new in the
sense of being conceived and built within the last twenty-one years, and new in that they represent a radical
divergence from the ways cinema-going has been seen within the social and cultural sphere. The development of
the multiplex has run in tandem with a year-on-year increase in cinema admissions, from the nadir of 1984.

This paper analyses the extent to which the multiplex ‘experience’ accounts for the increase in overall attendance
and questions whether we are seeing a broadening of the cinema-going demographic, as people return to the
cinema in greater numbers. This paper also examines how developments in the marketing of films have run in
tandem with developments in the cinema. Though, there is still some diversity in the kinds of films exhibited in
Britain and independent cinemas still play an important role in maintaining this diversity, it is the Hollywood film
which maintains hegemony in cinema distribution and exhibition in Britain. Moreover, though still a minority form
in the totality of the cinema infrastructure, the multiplex exerts a disproportionate power in terms of box-office
revenues and cinema admissions. The distribution and exhibition of films, and the selection offered by multiplexes
reflect a pattern of domination by US multinational film companies that is actually restricting ‘choice’: the oft-
trumpeted primary attraction of the multiplex.

Andrew Higson (UEA) ‘Banal/exotic: national images in the era of globalisation’

British cinema has long been a transnational cinema: from British audiences consuming foreign films on British
screens, to British production companies run by foreigners, or employing foreign staff in key creative roles; from
European co-productions to American investment in ‘British’ films; and from British films designed to succeed in
the American market to the global reach of ancillary markets. In this paper, I will concentrate on the contemporary
period and the circulation of filmic images of Britain and British people in transnational markets.

In the so-called era of globalisation, as national boundaries become blurred and transnational cultures form, we
might expect the cinematic projection of a self-consciously national identity to be markedly weakened. But I
would suggest that very often the most traditional and stereotypical manifestations of British national identity are
reproduced as novel and meaningful in films intended for transnational circulation. The most banal images of
Britain and Britishness are underlined, exaggerated and foregrounded; banal markers of national identity thus
become exotic signifiers of difference in the global market-place.
I will examine this phenomenon in a range of recent films that are in some way about contemporary Britain or
Britishness, including Notting Hill, Bride and Prejudice and The Constant Gardener, all international co-
productions designed for transnational circulation. There is still a strong invocation of a sense of community in
such films, even if it is variously local, multi-national, diasporic or ex-patriate. And if the iconography of Britain is
invariably given a contemporary spin in some way, it is still anchored to a sense of tradition. The reproduction of
familiar character types in novel guises again suggests that traditional national images may be strengthened and
renewed rather than weakened by the developments of globalisation. But the circulation of such images to
international audiences suggests that their effect is less about encouraging a sense of belonging and more about
familiarity and recognition, whether those images are recognised as banal or as exotic.

John Hill (Royal Holloway) ‘British Film Studies – Twenty Years On’

Taking as its cue the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-63,
the paper will consider the intellectual context in which the book was originally published and the nature of the
contribution to British film studies it was endeavouring to make. Given the explosion of work on British cinema in
the intervening period, the paper will go on to assess some of the ways in which the study of British cinema has
been transformed. In doing so, it will seek to revisit a number of key issues that continue to inform British film
studies. These will include the position of the director-auteur in British cinema studies, the tradition of realism, the
relationship of ‘British’ film to ‘British’ society, the relationship between film and television in the UK and the
role of textual analysis and evaluation.

Tobias Hochscherf & James Leggott (Northumbria), ‘From Marx and Engels to Marks and Spencer: The
Amber Film Collective, the GDR and a Trans-national documentary’

This paper examines the cooperation between the Newcastle-based independent production group Amber Film and
the state-controlled television of the German Democratic Republic. In the late 1980s, filmmakers from Amber and
the GDR initiated an exchange, by which a production team from the other country would make a film about
Newcastle upon Tyne and the German seaport Rostock. This unusual trans-national cooperation – the first joint
documentary film project involving DEFA, the East German film organisation, and a western partner – proved to
be unique in many ways. On the one hand it brought together people from countries that knew very little about
each other. On the other the films resulting from this exceptional collaboration illustrate that the problems, hopes
and dreams of the people in both countries were somewhat similar despite the general ideological divide.
Furthermore, while engaging in the highly political issues involved, the films reveal much about the political
ideology of its creators.

The presentation is divided into two parts. The first takes a closer look at the GDR film about Newcastle, entitled
“From Marx and Engels to Marks & Spencer”. This film draws upon the appalling decline of Newcastle as a result
of Thatcher’s neo-liberal economic policy. Less than a year before the GDR’s own economic collapse the film still
proclaims the superiority of a socialist society by showing a gritty, dark and ignored north of England as a
capitalist dystopia. The second part analyzes the Amber film made in East Germany, known as “From Marks &
Spencer to Marx and Engels”. While the beliefs and attitude of Amber as a left-wing collective seem to equal those
of their East-German counterparts, at first glance their representation of East Germany is offering a far from
immaculate image. In fact, the documentary seems to anticipate many of the problems that have caused the
collapse of the GDR and refuses to use Rostock as a role model for the regeneration of northern English cities.

We strongly believe that the cooperation between Amber Film and GDR television represents a new and hitherto
neglected chapter of British cinema. It raises questions of national identity and ideology. By standing in the
tradition of social realism alluding both to the documentary movement of the 1930s and to post-war European neo-
realism, the films are a fascinating example of the cross-fertilization of different national film cultures. Yet, it also
illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of British and East-German film production.

Stella Hockenhull (Staffs) ‘Neo-Romantic Landscapes: Aesthetic Approaches and the films of Powell and
Pressburger’

The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have historically been located in European art cinema
traditions and the film-makers themselves described as ‘foreign’ and ‘un-British’. This response to their films
stems from critical positions located in narrative, semiotic and psychoanalytical discourses which have dominated
Film Studies since the 1970s. However, if Powell and Pressburger’s war-time and immediate post-war films are
located in their historical cultural context, notably 1940’s Neo-Romantic painting, and their films examined using
an aesthetic approach in conjunction with Reception Studies, rather than narrative theory, they may be resituated
as British in broader cultural terms.

This paper focuses on Powell and Pressburger’s use of painterly images, here described as ‘frozen moments’, in
excess of narrative plausibility through the film-makers’ use of landscape in selected films of the 1940s. This
invites comparisons through a formal analysis with contemporaneous British Neo-Romantic landscape paintings.

The scope of this paper is to examine two Powell and Pressburger films, I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and
Gone to Earth (1950), within the above framework. I Know Where I’m Going! is analysed with the contention that
wartime reviewers implicitly acknowledged the presence of a Neo-Romantic tendency in the film through its
visual presentation. This is evidenced through a comparative analysis between the film text and Neo-Romantic
painting, and a study of the critical reception of the film contemporary to its release.

Powell and Pressburger’s later film, Gone to Earth, continues to present pictorial images imbued with visual detail
and deploys the same Neo-Romantic techniques used in I Know Where I’m Going! irrespective of a new cultural
climate. However, these images were not well received by the film’s contemporary critics who dismissed what
they perceived as its melodramatic style, finding the film unrealistic and overly flamboyant. The climate in which
Neo-Romanticism had flourished was no longer as strong, and the populace was not as receptive to the dark,
morbid imagery that had been effective in the 1940s. This paper offers a re-reading of Powell and Pressburger
using an aesthetic approach in conjunction with Reception Studies as a mode of analysis.

Rob Lapsley, ‘A cold eye on life, on death: Greenaway with Deleuze’

If the event found its philosopher in Deleuze, it found its film-maker in Greenaway. Where, in the midst of chaos,
Deleuze creates concepts, Greenaway produces images, fictions and other constructions. With a similarly
uncompromising tough-mindedness both are, at once, advocates and exemplars of innovation and experiment. This
paper explores this uncanny affinity not to reduce Greenaway’s cinema to an illustration of Deleuzean notions but
to use the work of each to question the limits of the other. In particular, it will consider identity, negation and
contradiction in Greenaway’s translation of the master-slave dialectic to seventeenth century Wiltshire, The
Draughtsman’s Contract, in the light of Deleuze’s rethinking of difference as difference in itself.

C P Lee (Salford) ‘Lights, Camera, Drizzle’

The recent documentaries on BBC TV about Mitchell and Kenyon of Bradford, and Bamforth of West Yorkshire
have brought the history of regional film-making to the attention of a wider audience. However, very little is
known about the pioneering work carried out in silent film studios away from the much better documented London
companies.

Film history of the UK almost always focuses on the usual Southern suspects and apart from a handful of brief
mentions usually neglects the importance, or even existence of film making in the regions.

This paper examines the development of the movie industry in Manchester from 1900 to 1929, in particular the
Lancashire Film Studio which boasted two film stages of equal size to any in London. Lancashire produced a large
variety of material ranging from 'Topicals' - essentially mini-documentaries - all the way to feature films such as
'Annie Laurie' and 'Terror In The South Seas'.

Finally this paper addresses two questions - Why did the studios disappear - and - why is this history so hidden?

Vicky Lowe (Manchester) ‘Robert Donat – Stardom and Performance in 1930s British Cinema’

This paper will examine the relationship between performance and stardom in British Cinema in the 1930s,
drawing parallels with contemporary British screen acting. The paper will argue that negotiating the demands of
acting and stardom are crucial for the specifically British screen actor and looks at the stage and film actor Robert
Donat, (1905-1958), drawing upon the collection of Donat’s private papers in the Donat Archive, (John Rylands
University, Manchester). The paper tracks how Donat’s performance practices (gained from experience on the
stage) came into conflict with discourses of film stardom in Donat’s career and will look at the discursive
construction of Donat’s celebrity in the British press of the time. It argues that this moved between him being seen
as a ‘type’ whose unique personality distinguished each film role he played, to that of a professional craftsman,
constructing roles with skill and technique.

David Martin-Jones (St Andrews) ‘The Loch Ness Monster Movie: Is the Joke’s on U.S.?’

In British cinema studies the popular genre of the Loch Ness monster movie has been effectively ignored. This is
surprising when you consider how integral the myth of the Loch Ness monster is to the international image of
Scotland, although it is perhaps not so strange considering the majority of Loch Ness monster movies have been
made with US funding for the US market. In contrast to the Godzilla films of Japan – indigenous works examining
Japan’s post-war identity in relation to dominant US culture – Scotland’s own monster heritage has been poached
and carried off for US consumption. However, since the mid 1990s several Loch Ness monster movies have
emerged, not only US productions like The Evil Beneath Loch Ness (2001), but also UK productions like Working
Title’s Loch Ness (1996) and the spoof Herzog documentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004). This paper explores the
different ways in which these films utilise their Scottish setting to humorously examine US and Scottish identities.

Initially Loch Ness and The Evil Beneath Loch Ness are examined in relation to US monster movies of the 1990s –
from Jurassic Park (1993) to Anaconda (1997) – situating them as part of a larger trend of monster films that use
“other” locations to examine US history and identity. On the other hand, the UK mockumentary Incident at Loch
Ness is shown to tap into a comedic tradition of Loch Ness monster images made in the UK stemming back
through Ian Rintoul’s Loch Ness Monster Movie (1984), to What a Whopper (1961) and even to appearances of
Nessie in newsreels of the 1930s. This “alternative” tradition often uses Nessie to poke fun at outsiders whilst
simultaneously confirming Scotland’s existence as an unspoilt tourist destination. It is like any number of Scottish
productions - from Whisky Galore! (1949) to Hamish MacBeth (1995) - which at once sell humorous stereotypes
of Scotland internationally, whilst re-assuring local audiences - with a knowing wink - of their superiority to the
outsider. Thus indigenous support for films which depict Scotland in a rather stereotypical light – like Loch Ness –
reveals a great deal about the economic agendas behind current film production in Scotland.

Nathalie Morris (UEA), ‘”A Big Story is Immeasurably Better than a Big Star”: The Stoll Film Company
and its Eminent British Authors’

This paper examines a group of films made by the Stoll Film Company, the largest British studio of the early to
mid 1920s. Stoll was formed in 1918, primarily as a rental firm. The company also produced a small number of
films until a cancelled distribution contract with the American Goldwyn Corporation at the end of 1919 prompted
Stoll to announce an ambitious plan to move into large-scale film production in the UK.

In May 1919, the company’s Managing Director, Jeffrey Bernerd had declared: ‘At the present time my own
company is not producing to a great extent, but the productions which I have selected are all based on well-known
books – popular successes. Reading such books, the public naturally endeavour to visualise the characters and they
are keenly interested in seeing them upon the screen’.

In line with this policy, Stoll now purchased the rights to a vast number of works by contemporary (or near-
contemporary) British writers. In an attempt to displace Hollywood’s post-war dominance of British cinema
screens, Stoll produced over seventy feature-length adaptations within the next three years alone. Many of the
films have been subject to severe criticism by historians such as Rachael Low, who have questioned the suitability
of pre-sold works being turned into films. My discussion re-examines some of Stoll’s films in the light of more
recent scholarship that celebrates rather than denigrates British cinema’s interaction with other cultural forms. Its
long-standing relationship with literature and with the publishing industry is central to these debates but this paper
also considers some of its other industrial and aesthetic practices, with close reference to the often imaginative, and
occasionally pioneering, policies and productions of the Stoll Film Company.

John Mundy (Salford) 'Seeking Wisdom: towards a reassessment of 1950s British screen comedy'.

In spite of some recent sympathetic academic writing, the1950s remains one of the most neglected and critically
derided decades in British cinema history and British comedy films are part of that general neglect. For different
reasons, and with the exception of the work of Tony Hancock, early British television comedy also suffers from
critical neglect, even though British cinema, television and radio benefited from the influx of new comedy talent
that had been nurtured in the armed forces and emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Rank, Ealing, ABPC
and independents such as Anglo-Amalgamated all produced comedy films that, though markedly different,
addressed the social and cultural transformations of the new Elizabethan age, centred on challenges to class,
gender, national and generational identity. Films such as Rank’s Genevieve (1953) and Doctor in the House
(1954), ABPC’s For Better, For Worse (1954) and British Lion’s Lucky Jim (1957) explored middle-class
meritocracy and modernity at odds with institutional tradition. Transformations in gender power and identities
were explored in these and more scatological vehicles such as The Belles of St Trinians (1954). The threats to
established notions of British (and more specifically English) national identity implicit in American mass culture
are rehearsed in comedies such as As Long As They’re Happy (1955). By the end of the decade, Anglo-
Amalgamated’s Carry On Sergeant, Carry On Nurse and Carry On Teacher (all 1959) routinely questioned
institutional traditions and values that were seen as increasingly redundant.

Some of the most successful 1950s British film comedies were those starring Norman Wisdom. If many British
comedies questioned institutional values and structures from a middle-class perspective, Wisdom’s films, starting
with Trouble In Store (1953), show their limitations from the perspective of a working-class character eager to fit
in. Short, socially inept and physically ungainly in an ill-fitting ‘Gump’ outfit, Wisdom’s protagonists challenge
and expose conventional notions of gender and class identity in radically different ways. In a manner that
challenges much orthodox criticism, Wisdom’s exploitation of sentiment, slapstick and pathos reveals the often
brutal manifestations of class and gender relationships. As this paper shows, though often critically derided for
‘excessive’ comic pathos, Wisdom’s films such as Man of the Moment (1955) were remarkably successful at
exposing the hypocrisies of the British class system, as well as the limitations of contemporary constructions of
gender and national identity.

Lawrence Napper (UEA) ‘Brief Encounter and Film-going in Wartime Britain’

Made towards the end of the Second World War, but set during the 1930s, Brief Encounter is one of a number of
wartime films which look back at pre-war British life with an explicit nostalgia. This paper will use the several
brief sequences showing Alec and Laura in the cinema as a springboard for a discussion of some of the seismic
changes to the film-going experience brought about by the war, as revealed by reports in Kinematograph Weekly.
I will suggest that the dissonance between the film-going experience as depicted in the film, and that which was
the lot of contemporary audiences gives Brief Encounter a much more intense investment in nostalgia and memory
than modern readings tend to allow for. More importantly, it reveals a series of day to day changes in the ways in
which cinemas were run and experienced which had important consequences for film-making and film-going in
the post-war period.

Julian Petley (Brunel), ‘An A-Z of The Lost Continent’

Since ‘The Lost Continent’ appeared in Charles Barr’s edited collection All Our Yesterdays in 1986, a great deal
has been done to map the contours of the kind of cinema championed by that chapter. However, the film to which
the title paid homage remains relatively unknown, as does, still, a good deal of the kind of British cinema which it
represents. What I therefore propose is to use The Lost Continent as a synecdoche for the ‘Lost Continent’ and, in
particular, to employ this device in such a way as to highlight still-neglected areas of British cinema worthy of
exploration. Thus, for example, C is for the film’s director Michael Carreras (whose Maniac and Slave Girls have
been unjustly overlooked). M is for music, and in particular that of the film’s composer, Gerard Schürmann, whose
modernist score prompts appraisal of the fact that other modernist composers such as Benjamin Frankel, Elizabeth
Lutyens and Tristram Cary contributed notable scores to British horror movies. L is for other ‘lost world’ movies
such as The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot, films which themselves seem to have been
largely forgotten. And S is for self-censorship; William Lustig has restored eight minutes of footage to the R1
Anchor Bay DVD release which were cut from the film before it was submitted to the BBFC, and this raises
interesting questions about the fate of other British horror films before the Board passed its final judgement on
them…

Gill Plain (St Andrews) ‘From Shorty Blake to Tubby Binns: Subaltern Agency and the British War
Movie’

There are a number of reasons why John Mills stands out as an exemplary figure in British cinema history. His
career as a leading man stretched from the 1930s to the 1960s, and unlike many of his contemporaries he never left
to seek his fortune in Hollywood. Given that Mills was seldom out of work, and that almost from the outset of his
career he was seen as somehow peculiarly ‘English’, he represents an ideal case study for the exploration of
changing patterns of masculinity and national identity in mid-century Britain. But there is one further dimension
of Mills’s career that stands out as remarkable within the contexts of British cinema: he played across the class
barrier. Directors cast him and audiences accepted him as the embodiment of both working and middle-class
masculinities. On screen, Mills could both command authority and follow orders, and by the end of the Second
World War, this mutability had made him into the ideal of ‘democratic ordinariness’ (Spicer, 2001: 10).

In this paper I will explore some of the ambiguities and tensions surrounding Mills’s embodiment of working class
masculinity in two films about the underdog’s triumph over adversity: Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942)
and Leslie Norman’s Dunkirk (1958). Although separated by over a decade, there are remarkable similarities in
the two films’ deployment of Mills as a symbol of national virtues, but the radically different contexts in which the
they were made suggest that the two roles can not be read in the same way. I will consider whether Mills’s
performance as Tubby Binns is a reiteration of his seminal performance as Shorty Blake and, given Judith Butler’s
claim that the repeated iteration norms inevitably exposes their instability, I will examine the implications of this
repetition. Should Mills’s reiteration of 1940’s class and gender norms in the changing context of the 1950s be
read as historical verisimilitude, an exercise in nostalgia or a disruptive indication of the ongoing impossibility of
representing the working classes in mainstream British cinema?

Anna Powell (MMU) ‘Molecularity and Mushrooms: Ken Russell’s Altered States.’

In 1980, a year before Russell’s film was released, Deleuze and Guattari announced ‘pharmacoanalysis’ as a
replacement for psychoanalysis This polemical claim reveals the impact of drugs, or at least drugs–related art, on
their philosophy. The film of Altered States does not just depict Jessup’s mental alterations. It also literalises
alterity through physical transformation. Here, I explore the impact of drugs in film via cinematic techniques
expressing narcotic effects in a specific drugs cluster of images, music, editing styles and other effects. By
identifying these, I want to interrogate how far this film impacts on us as an agent of becoming by inducing altered
states of mind and body.

In discovering how Russell’s cinematic images can be used to explore alterity, I construct a working assemblage of
philosophers, artists and explorers of delirium: Deleuze and Guattari; Henri Bergson; Carlos Castaneda; Antonin
Artaud and Timothy Leary. Russell’s film belongs to a further network of alterity via the original novel Altered
States by Russell’s screenplay writer, Paddy Chayefsky (1980), itself based on John Lilly’s (1973) book on his
flotation tank trips, The Centre of the Cyclone. In cross–referencing these sources with DeleuzeGuattarian
philosophy, I want to locate it in a wider context of cultural responses to the impact of drugs.

Harvard researcher Edward Jessup (William Hurt)’s search for alterity passes through several stages in Russell’s
film. Each ‘trip’ moves him further back in time until changes in consciousness manifest in bodily alteration. At
the same time, he moves further away from the repressive Oedipal structures that have previously colonised his
unconscious. This paper explores how the hallucinatory mental states presented by Russell literalise Deleuze’s
alignment of brain and screen, to both express and induce altered states.

Niall Richardson (Sunderland) Effeminophobia on British Screens: ‘Are you being served’ to Channel 4’s
‘Playing it Straight’

This paper considers a theme common to British Popular Culture: effeminophobia (the fear of effeminacy) by
analysing a recent example of British ‘Trash TV’: Channel 4’s Playing It Straight. The paper argues that Playing it
Straight, like much other popular British entertainment, is structured around ‘effeminophobia’ rather than, as it is
often incorrectly labelled, homophobia. It then considers how effeminophobia is often united with misogyny and
that contemporary texts like Playing It Straight attempt to disguise this with a veil of ‘New Laddist’ irony. The
paper will suggest that although shows like Playing It Straight (and other similar examples from popular British
film and television) are arguably very offensive to both heterosexual women and gay men, their emphasis on
‘effeminophobia’ rather than ‘homophobia’ makes them sources of ambivalent or negotiated readings.

Jason Scott (Trinity and All Saints Leeds) ‘The Economies of British Art Realism’

Within this paper I will focus on a number of recent films that can be considered to combine characteristic aspects
of the Realist tradition in British cinema, particularly Social Realism as identified with the films directed by Ken
Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke, with art cinema influences, overt narrational devices and character
subjectivity more readily associated with films directed by Terrence Davies. I will address the similarities and
differences in the way these films blend the familiar and novel, in relation to their contexts of production,
distribution and exhibition. For instance, considering the funding and distribution opportunities for this dependable
British cinematic mode; the multiple and various available sources of funding in the 1990s and 00s - lottery
funding, television production finance or pre-sale of tv rights, regional film boards, the Arts Council, Film
Council, US distributors, foreign television companies such as Canal +, and new independent production
companies. Similarly, I will discuss the openings for theatrical exhibition, including festival showcasing, and
significant international markets, primarily Europe and America. Additionally, I will address subsequent exhibition
(broadcast) on television, and also DVD/video where appropriate. The films I will consider include Ratcatcher
(1999), Morvern Callar (2002), Last Resort (2000), My Summer of Love (2004), Heartlands (2002), A Room for
Romeo Brass (1999), Dead Man's Shoes (2004), Wonderland (1999), Lawless Heart (2001) and Pure (2002).

Susan Smith (Sunderland) ‘Jenny Agutter and The Railway Children’

This paper considers the 1970 film version of The Railway Children, looking at some of the creative implications
arising from certain key decisions that the director Lionel Jeffries made in transferring Nesbit's story onto the
screen. This includes looking at the role that Jenny Agutter's voice and overall performance play in shaping the
film's rhetorical and thematic properties. It also considers Agutter's overall relationship to the story (taking into
account her performances in other screen adaptations of the novel) as one based on revisitation and return and
relates this to the ways in which Jeffries' film seems especially adept at inviting its own adult audience to forge an
enduring bond of affection with it as a text.

Andrew Spicer (University of the West of England) ‘The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to
British Film History’

The role of the screenwriter has been largely erased from film history, which has preferred to cast the director as a
film’s ‘author’. Although there have been some analyses of the Hollywood screenwriter – notably Richard
Corliss's Talking Pictures (1975) or Richard Fine’s Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship (1985) – there are
no equivalent studies that focus on British cinema, only populist anthologies of interviews such as Alistair Owen’s
Story and Character (2003). However, there have been a number of studies of studios or producers that do include
a consideration of the screenwriter, including Charles Barr's studies of Ealing Studios (1980) and English
Hitchcock (1999). The intention of this paper is to build on such studies, in the attempt to open up the whole issue
of the function and status of the screenwriter as a mutable phenomenon in British cinema, one that changes in
relation to economic and cultural shifts within the industry. The general arguments will be explored through two
case studies. The first examines how the writer-producer Sydney Box (1940-65) sought to promote the
screenwriter during his tenure as Head of Gainsborough Pictures (1946-49), which included giving opportunities to
first time writers, to mavericks (Dylan Thomas) and creating a series of W. Somerset Maugham adaptations,
beginning with Quartet (1948), that were dubbed a 'writer's cinema'. In contrast, the second case study focuses on
Richard Curtis, undoubtedly the most influential writer now working within the British film industry, and will
discuss his evolution from television 'gag man' to romantic comedy writer, focusing on his relationship with
Working Title – including consideration of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Love Actually (2003) – and his
'return' to the BBC with The Girl in the Café (2005).

Sarah Street (Bristol) ‘Exporting the Rainbow: Technicolor films in Britain’

The focus of this paper will be on how Technicolor was used when it was exported to Britain, asking whether a
‘British school of Technicolor’ can be identified. Although the majority of British films were made in black and
white, once Technicolor was introduced in the mid-1930s it became by far the most widely used color process until
the mid-1950s. Filming in Technicolor was expensive, but it was used in Britain for key films including Wings of
the Morning (1937), The Drum (1938), Sixty Glorious Years (1938), The Four Feathers (1939), The Thief of
Bagdad (1940), Henry V (1944), Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black
Narcissus (1947), Scott of the Antarctic (1948), The Red Shoes (1948), Moulin Rouge (1952) and The Ladykillers
(1955). When Technicolor was exported to Britain application of the process was overseen by Natalie Kalmus, a
co-developer of Technicolor who was credited as ‘color consultant’ on all Technicolor films from 1933 to 1949
and established laboratories in Britain. She developed clear guidelines for the use of the process, developing a
theory of ‘color consciousness’ through the use of charts for each film that operated almost like a musical score
that associated color intensity with dominant moods or emotions. Many British cinematographers recall that
Kalmus could be obstructive when they wanted to experiment with color and some commentators, including
Martin Scorsese, credit cinematographers such as Jack Cardiff with developing a British use of Technicolor that
was distinct from its application in the USA. My paper will investigate this claim, drawing on interviews with
Cardiff, examples from the films listed above and with particular emphasis on Black Narcissus. As well as
describing the industrial conditions for British Technicolor I will present textual analyses in order to assess how
color was used in British films, at a time when critics generally valorised black and white as more appropriate for
creating the dominant, aesthetically privileged codes of realism.

Jonathan Stubbs (UEA) ‘The ‘Frozen Coin Game: Blocked Currency and American Production in Britain’

During the early 1950s, the proliferation of ‘runaway’ productions from America changed the face of the British
film industry in the post-war era. These films, and the massive investments from Hollywood studios that supported
them, transformed Britain’s production base and challenged conceptions of what constituted ‘British’ film-making.
The ground for these American co-productions was prepared not by the introduction of the Eady Levy in 1951, as
is commonly supposed, but by the Board of Trade’s decision to ‘block’ the revenues made by major American
businesses after the post-war balance of payments crisis. The substantial profits generated by the distribution of
Hollywood films in Britain were effectively put under embargo and could only be recovered once a certain
proportion had been spent in Britain itself. In this way, the British government were able to entice the Hollywood
studios to invest in British production on a scale never seen before. In this paper I will examine the economic and
cultural ramifications of Hollywood’s partial relocation to Britain. In particular, I will focus on the production of
the British-registered film Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), which was filmed at Denham Studios using
blocked currency accumulated by Warner Bros. Archived correspondence between Warner Bros. executives in Los
Angeles and producers in London detail the complexities of adapting to British production techniques, placating
the protests of the British unions and accommodating the appetites of stars such as Gregory Peck in ration-afflicted
Britain. Above all, a picture emerges of the extraordinary lengths Warner Bros. were prepared to go to in order to
invest and thus recover every possible penny of their ?frozen coin?. By 1952, Hollywood companies had recovered
the majority of their revenues from Britain. Initially regarded as an inconvenience and an affront to the principles
of free trade, the blocking of currency ultimately proved to be a boon to the American studios. British production
boosted their takings in European markets at a time when American audiences were in decline, and gave them a
head start.

Melanie Williams (Hull). ‘The David Lean/Ann Todd films’

This paper, part of a larger project on the films of David Lean, will look at the series of films the director made
starring his then-wife Ann Todd between 1949 and 1952: The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950) and
The Sound Barrier (1952). These films fall between the two better known and more critically esteemed periods of
Lean's career - the early Noel Coward collaborations and Dickens adaptations and the later international epics - but
in spite of their (relative) obscurity within his oeuvre, they are of some interest and raise significant questions
relating to authorial identity, director/star relationships (both on and off screen) and the place of women in Lean's
cinema.

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