Download or read book The British working class in postwar film written by Philip Gillett and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incidental pleasure of watching a film is what it tells us about the society in which it is made. Using a sociological model, The British working class in postwar film looks at how working-class people were portrayed in British feature films in the decade after the Second World War. Though some of the films examined are well known, others have been forgotten and deserve reassessment. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Students of media and cultural studies are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields. This work should appeal to all readers interested in social history and in how cinema and society works.
Download or read book A Companion to the Gangster Film written by George S. Larke-Walsh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A companion to the study of the gangster film’s international appeal spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia A Companion to the Gangster Film presents a comprehensive overview of the newest scholarship on the contemporary gangster film genre as a global phenomenon. While gangster films are one of America’s most popular genres, gangster movies appear in every film industry across the world. With contributions from an international panel of experts, A Companion to the Gangster Film explores the popularity of gangster films across three major continents, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The authors acknowledge the gangster genre’s popularity and examine the reasons supporting its appeal to twenty-first century audiences across the globe. The book examines common themes across all three continents such as production histories and reception, gender race and sexuality, mafia mythologies, and politics. In addition, the companion clearly shows that no national cinema develops in isolation and that cinema is a truly global popular art form. This important guide to the gangster film genre: Reveals how the gangster film engages in complex and contradictory themes Examines the changing face of the gangster film in America Explores the ideas of gangsterism and migration in the Hispanic USA, Latin America and the Caribbean Discusses the wide variety of gangster types to appear in European cinema Contains a review of a wide-range of gangster films from the Americans, Europe, and Asia Written for academics and students of film, A Companion to the Gangster Film offers a scholarly and authoritative guide exploring the various aspects and international appeal of the gangster film genre.
Download or read book Film and the Working Class written by Peter Stead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney. Reviews of the original edition: ‘...fills a gap in film studies...the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.’
Download or read book Forgotten British Film written by Philip Gillett and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some films are remembered long after they are released; others are soon forgotten, but do they deserve oblivion? Are factors other than quality involved? This book exhumes some of the films released in Britain over the last seventy years from Daybreak (1948) to 16 Years of Alcohol (2003), and considers the reasons for their neglect. As well as exploring the contributions of those involved in making the films, the book examines such issues as marketing and the response of critics and audiences. Films are grouped loosely into categories such as “B” films and television films. Some works were little seen when they were first released and have stayed that way; others were popular in their day, but have slipped into obscurity. In some cases, social change has overtaken them, making the attitudes or subjects they depict seem dated. Even being released as a DVD does not guarantee that a title will be rehabilitated. In addition, how significant is the American market? This book should appeal to lovers of British film, as well as to film studies students and everybody curious about the vagaries of success and failure in the arts.
Download or read book Blood Sweat and Toil written by Geoffrey G. Field and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first scholarly history of the British working class in the Second World War. It integrates social, political, and labour history, and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities. Geoffrey Field examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities, and the nation. Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, the records of trade unions and numerous other institutions, Blood, Sweat, and Toil traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their aspirations and their social and political attitudes. Previous studies of the Home Front have analysed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, Field argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was 'remade', achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. Employing a contingent, non-teleological conception of class identity and indicating the plural and shifting mix of factors that contributed to workers' social consciousness, he criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society.
Download or read book The Gardens of the British Working Class written by Margaret Willes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played—and continues to play—an integral role in everyday British life.
Download or read book The British New Wave written by B. F. Taylor and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. By eschewing the usual tendency to view films like A Kind of Loving and The Entertainer collectively and include them in broader debates about class, gender, and ideology, this book presents a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films. For each film, a re-distribution of existing critical emphasis also allows the problematic relationship between these films and the question of realism to be reconsidered. Drawing upon existing sources and returning to long-standing and unchallenged assumptions about these films, this book offers the opportunity for the reader to return to the British New Wave and decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the films.
Download or read book The working class in mid twentieth century England written by Ben Jones and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book maps how working class life was transformed in England in the middle years of the twentieth century. National trends in employment, welfare and living standards are illuminated via a focus on Brighton, providing valuable new perspectives of class and community formation. Based on fresh archival research, life histories and contemporary social surveys, the book historicises important cultural and community studies which moulded popular perceptions of class and social change in the post-war period. It shows how council housing, slum clearance and demographic trends impacted on working-class families and communities. While suburbanisation transformed home life, leisure and patterns of association, there were important continuities in terms of material poverty, social networks and cultural practices. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern and contemporary social and cultural history, sociology, cultural studies and human geography.
Download or read book Film and the Historian written by Philip Gillett and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films are not just for audiences: historians of the twentieth century have much to learn from them. A film exposes the attitudes and unconsidered trifles that people took for granted and which were not considered worth recording elsewhere. This volume surveys British cinema from the final days of the Second World War to the early 1970s, exploring societal change across a range of topics including housing, the countryside, psychiatry and the law. This provides a basis for cross-cultural comparisons, with many issues deserving of further research being highlighted. The films discussed range from the well-known Odd Man Out to the forgotten It’s Hard to be Good.
Download or read book British Cinema in the 1950 s written by Ian MacKillop and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a variety of genres, such as war films and women's pictures, as well as social issues which affect film-making, this is a re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film industry.
Download or read book Picturing home written by Hollie Price and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns.
Download or read book The Little Stranger written by Sarah Waters and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules. Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds. But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses’ lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely. Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.
Download or read book The War Inside written by Michal Shapira and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history"--
Download or read book Black Market Britain written by Mark Roodhouse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of the underground economy in austerity Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including recently declassified material, it reveals the nature and extent of black marketeering in rationed and price controlled goods during the 1940s and early 1950s.
Download or read book Melodrama Self and Nation in Post War British Popular Film written by Johanna Laitila and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the portrayal of nationalities and sexualities in British post-Second World War crime film and melodrama. By focussing on these genres, and looking at the concept of melodrama as an analytical tool apt for the analysis of both sexuality and nation, the book offers insight into the desires, fears, and anxieties of post-war culture. The problem of returning to ‘normalcy’ after the war is one of the recurring themes discussed; alienation from society, family, and the self were central issues for both women and men in the post-war years, and the book examines the anxieties surrounding these social changes in the films of the period. In particular, it explores heterosexuality and nationality as some of the most prominent frameworks for the construction of identities in our time, structures that, for all their centrality, are made invisible in our culture.
Download or read book Gay Men and the Left in Post war Britain written by Lucy Robinson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available in paperback for the first time, his book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to fundamentally rethink the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. Robinson shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of British Cinema written by Alan Burton and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British cinema has been around from the very birth of motion pictures, from black-and-white to color, from talkies to sound, and now 3D, it has been making a major contribution to world cinema. Many of its actors and directors have stayed at home but others ventured abroad, like Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. Today it is still going strong, the only real competition to Hollywood, turning out films which appeal not only to Brits, just think of Bridget Jones, while busily adding to franchises like James Bond and Harry Potter. So this Historical Dictionary of British Cinema has a lot of ground to cover. This it does with over 300 dictionary entries informing us about significant actors, producers and directors, outstanding films and serials, organizations and studios, different films genres from comedy to horror, and memorable films, among other things. Two appendixes provide lists of award-winners. Meanwhile, the chronology covers over a century of history. These parts provide the details, countless details, while the introduction offers the big story. And the extensive bibliography points toward other sources of information.
