British Cinemas, British Identities

1
British Cinemas, British Identities
2
Who Are We?

• Britain and England are not the same.
• Britain England, Scotland, Wales, Northern
  Ireland/the North of Ireland.
• Regional identities.
• Ethnic identities.
• Im British but .

3
Identity Crisis?

• Identity only becomes an issue when it is in
  crisis, when something assumed to be fixed,
  coherent and stable is displaced by the
  experience of doubt and uncertainty.
• (Kobena Mercer, quoted in Modernity and its
  Futures, Stuart Hall, Polity 1992).

4
Components of the Crisis

• Globalisation.
• Europe.
• Northern Ireland/North of Ireland.
• Devolution.
• Ethnicity.

5
Culture and National Identity

• A nation does not express itself through its
  culture it is cultural apparatuses that produce
  the nation. (James Donald, Sentimental
  Education, Verso 1992).
• The nation is not just a collection of
  institutions, it is a system of cultural
  representations, a symbolic community.
• The media play a key role in this system.

6
Nations and Stories

• Nations and peoples are largely the stories they
  feed themselves. (Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven,
  Phoenix 1996).
• The life of nations no less than that of men is
  lived largely in the imagination. (Enoch Powell,
  quoted in The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain,
  Profile Books 2000).
• Nations as imagined communities.

7
British Cinema

• How British is it?
• Is it cinema?
• Commercial and cultural.

8
The Heritage Industry

• Key texts The Heritage Industry, Robert Hewison,
  Methuen 1987 On Living in an Old Country,
  Patrick Wright, Verso 1985.
• Heritage culture imagines the community in a
  very particular way.
• Closely linked to the Thatcherite project of
  making Britain great again and returning to
  Victorian values.

9
Heritage Culture

• One of the most powerful imaginative constructs
  of our time (Raphael Samuel, Patriotism,
  Routledge 1989).
• Backward-looking, nostalgic.
• Rural.
• White
• Focussed on the upper classes.
• English, and frequently southern.
• A laundered, sanitised past.
• The glamour of backwardness (Tom Nairn, The
  Enchanted Glass, Vintage 1994).

10
Heritage Culture

• Heritage representations function as lures which
  oppose their brilliance to the more tawdry and
  divided experience of contemporary Britain
  (Patrick Wright).
• National Heritage is the backward glance taken
  from the edge of a vividly imagined abyss
  (Patrick Wright).

11
Heritage Culture

• Not since the 1890s or the 1930s has the worship
  of wistfulness been so widespread. And there in
  part lies the explanation then, as now,
  depression is the begetter of nostalgia (David
  Cannadine, quoted in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of
  Memory, Verso 1994).
• One of the marks of the feudal ancien regime was
  that the dead governed the living. A mark of a
  decrepit political system must surely be that a
  fictitious past of theme parks and costume dramas
  governs the present (Neal Ascherson, quoted in
  ibid).

12
Heritage Cinema and Television

• Chariots of Fire (1981)
• The work of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant
  (Howards End (1992), Room With a View (1986)
  etc.)
• Brideshead Revisited (1981,Granada Television).

13
Heritage Cinema and Television

• Continuing the tradition of the historical film,
  the costume drama and the tv classic serial.
• Connotations of quality and high culture.
• A country house version of Englishness
• Loving re-creation of period details.
• The past is delivered as a museum of sounds and
  images (Andrew Higson in British Cinema and
  Thatcherism, Lester Friedman (ed.), UCL Press
  1993).

14
Heritage Cinema and Television

• Settings play as great a role as character and
  action.
• The visuals are frequently seductive and
  self-consciously aesthetic.
• Narrative is transformed into spectacle, which
  becomes an end in itself.
• Like a lovely day out in some National Trust
  property (Sunday Telegraph review of Pride and
  Prejudice (1995)).
• All the classic ingredients are here the
  exquisite period settings, breathtaking
  photography and a superb cast (video cover of
  Maurice (1987)).

15
Post-Heritage Historical Cinema

• Orlando (1992).
• Braveheart (1995).
• The Madness of King George (1997).
• Elizabeth (1998).
• Shakespeare in Love (1999).

16
Re-branding Britain

• We must not define ourselves solely in terms of
  the past, or tradition, or what we have
  inherited. Culture and personal and national
  identity are every bit as much if not more
  about the future as they are about the past
  (Chris Smith, former Culture Minister, Creative
  Britain, Faber 1998).

17
Re-branding Britain

• When we try to understand how our national
  culture and sense of identity intertwine, let us
  remember first and foremost that diversity is one
  of the key ingredients of both that culture and
  that identity (Smith).

18
Young People

• Trainspotting (1996).
• Twin Town (1996)
• Human Traffic (1999).
• These films also represent aspects of Britishness
  other than Englishness.

19
The Underclass

• The work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.
• Brassed Off (1996).
• The Full Monty (1997).
• Nil by Mouth (1997).

20
Ethnic Communities

• Most modern cultures consist of a number of
  different and distinct cultures and stories.
• It has been suggested (in the report The Future
  of Multi-Ethnic Britain) that Britain is best
  regarded as a community of communities.
• Multi-culturalism and the legacy of 9/11.
• Cinemas and televisions generally liberal
  stance on ethnicity contrasts strikingly with the
  illiberal views expressed by much of the press on
  this issue.

21
Ethnic Communities

• My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
• My Son the Fanatic (1997)
• East is East (1999).
• The work of Gurinder Chadha.
• Yasmin (2004).