by Josephine Botting Approaching an archival collection the scale of Adrian Brunel’s is a daunting prospect. Every box contains a hotchpotch of items, which at first defy coherence: snapshots, letters, diaries, cuttings, contracts, scribblings on scraps of paper, legal summons…
by John White In the second of a short series of extracts from British Cinema and a Divided Nation (EUP, 2022), John White looks at Downton Abbey (Michael Engler, 2019). The quick series of shots presented to the audience at…
by John White In the first of a short series of extracts from British Cinema and a Divided Nation (EUP, 2022), John White looks at Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke, 2018). In this film we are presented with a…
By Julian Petley and Andrew Roberts Catch up with Part One of Culture Wars, Talking Pictures and the Telegraph For Heffer, ‘the lesson of Talking Pictures is clear. It portrays the England millions of us wish we still lived in’.…
Explore how the recently published New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema by David Forrest came to be. The writing of a book begins with conversations, and this one was no different. In 2015, I was invited to a film festival in…
Read Laura Mayne’s overview of the new book Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, which re-evaluates a critically neglected period in British film history. Has here been any decade more inconsistent in the public imagination than the 1960s? Lived recollections of the…
Read on to catch a glimpse of one of the chapters from Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture, edited by Barbara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Louis Trost. Earlier this year, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry…
Britain has long had a contradictory relationship to movie stardom, as two articles from the fan magazine Picturegoer, both by the same writer, both from 1943, eloquently demonstrate. In October, Lionel Collier had asked hopefully ‘are we making our own…
By Ieuan Franklin Where are the films being made today about ‘Austerity Britain’ that combine social realism and humour, as in The Full Monty (1997)? In my article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television last year I looked…