British Cinema in Documents

Sarah Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781136219955
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

British Cinema in Documents presents an introduction to the key concerns and debates in British cinema through documents, ranging from official papers to fan magazines. Sarah Street shows how such documentary material can enrich our understanding of cinema's place in national culture and shed new light on defining moments in British cinema history.
Street draws together a wide range of material, discussing oral histories, film posters and stills and star memorabilia alongside audience surveys, censorship reports, fan magazines and web sites, providing a context for each extract she discusses. She uses a series of case studies, including film censorship during the Second World War, the fan cultures surrounding stars from Margaret Lockwood to Ewan McGregor, and surveys of the British cinema audience to illustrate how archival research can provide a new understanding of the relationship between a film and other kinds of texts, and between films, their audiences, and the state.

1 The texts and methods of film history(ies)

British Cinema in Documents aspires to place contextual analysis in the foreground of Film Studies. In so doing it is important to begin by acknowledging some key issues which have been raised by historiographical debates.

There has long been a need for film historians to stand back and consider their aims and methods, a need made all the more urgent since postmodern critiques of the relationship between ‘the past’ (something which did occur) and ‘history’ (an interpretative construct created by historians) have raised key questions concerning the very nature of those aims and methods.¹ While contemporary historians encourage an on-going re-evaluation of their craft, and agree that their accounts of the past are mediated by their personal standpoints and selection of the evidence, most would be reluctant to accept White’s now infamous view of ‘history’ as a total fiction (White 1973).² It is not difficult to see why: accepting that ‘the past’ and ‘history’ are not the same thing implies a logic which denies the possibility of recovering any accurate sense of the context or specificity of a ‘past event’, collapsing history and literature into a common fictional pursuit. On the other hand, these debates have offered a welcome corrective to nineteenth-century conceptions of history as an empirical science, which had already been challenged by earlier twentieth-century historians including the Annales School and social historians (see Iggers 1997). The result is a much more tentative approach which places an even greater responsibility on the historian to scrutinize methodologies, to be explicit about the range of approaches being used in any given interpretation of the past, and to embrace a broad, intertextual conception of the interaction between politics, economics and culture. As Iggers has argued:

What is needed … is a broad historical approach that takes both cultural and institutional aspects into consideration. The postmodern critique of traditional science and traditional historiography has offered important correctives to historical thought and practice. It has not destroyed the historian’s commitment to recapturing reality or his or her belief in a logic of inquiry, but has demonstrated the complexity of both.

(Iggers 1997: 16)

Such thought has far-reaching implications for film history. Inspired by approaches utilized by the Annales School, Barbara Klinger’s call (1997) for a ‘cinematic histoire totale’, based on a model which seeks to examine a film text’s ‘discursive surround’, is not an impossible aim. Klinger starts with a film’s immediate context, and proposes that this should be related outwards to embrace broader social and historical contexts – a combination of synchronic and diachronic research – in an attempt to grapple with some of the complexities which arise from the specificity of film (Klinger 1997: 113–28).

Film, of course, has a different status from a historical event. Many films are not lost in the past; unlike events, which are irrecoverable in a literal sense, accessible only in historians’ accounts which may reveal as much about themselves and their own time of writing as about the events themselves. But although the film text survives, its meaning is not fixed. The challenge for the film historian is to appreciate the extent to which a film is both of its time and out of it: of its time in the sense that it would have generated a particular set of meanings on first release; and out of its time in the sense that the ‘historicizing’ account is always a mediated one, and over the years the film itself acquires new meanings. As with other areas of enquiry, film history is based on the co-existence of historical accounts, revisionist works which remind us, as Klenotic has argued, ‘of the power of discourses about the past to alter reality and change history for the present and for the future’ (Klenotic 1994: 57). From this perspective it is useful to think of historical revisionism as an essential dynamic, moving knowledge forward, never standing still and always aware of its own contestable status.

In order to tease out the diverse relations and meanings, the film historian has to draw on a plethora of source material, often not directly concerned with the films in question. Only then can we begin to grasp the complexities of film as an aspect of wider historical experience. The film is not lost, but ceases to be an end in itself. While the initial enquiry might be suggested by a film or genre, of necessity the pursuit of ‘a cinematic histoire totale’ draws the researcher into areas which might, at first sight, not appear to be relevant to the study of film. The institutional boundaries which have separated the study of film from the study of history are therefore collapsed: film is a part of history and history is a part of film.

This book will attempt to establish a working methodology for film historians who wish to broaden study from the text to intertext and context, using ‘primary’ sources as a starting-point. It should be stressed that what constitutes the ‘archive’ need not consist solely of written documentation; it might also include posters, stills, oral histories and memorabilia.

In adopting such an approach the researcher must be prepared to end up in a totally different area from what was first expected. For example, as chapters in this book demonstrate, a study of the films produced by Filippo Del Giudice might finish as an analysis of the internal dynamics of the British film industry in the 1940s; research on film audiences broadens out to become a study of the ideology and impact of early social scientific research methods.

The approach might also involve an interrogation of the concept of ‘popular’ cinema, analysing, for example, which British films have been most popular with British and other audiences. This question would appear at first sight to be purely factual, but for a full analysis the historian must scrutinize many different types of evidence (such as box-office figures, replies to questionnaires, film company records, fan magazines, oral histories and memorabilia), including the films themselves. What does ‘popular’ mean? Popular with whom? How can this be measured? How do you interpret the measurements? Which figures do you use and where do you find them? As can be seen from this example, every question generates more questions. However, before these can be considered it is important to ask why the question is being asked in the first place.

It is crucial to appreciate the extent to which the question of popularity is based on previous work on British cinema; it is a question that would not have been asked thirty years ago. Studies of ‘the popular’ involve an ideological shift away from the study of auteur cinema – away from the critic and towards the cinema-goer. Like social histories which examine traces of the experience of the disenfranchised masses, studies of film audiences share the concern to break free from constructs of ‘value’ perpetuated by the film critical establishment. As such, research on film audiences can be related to a wider trend in historical study: history from below.

While it is necessary to recover empirical data in order to assess what was popular, the interpretation of that data involves sifting through other evidence with the aim of arriving at an interpretation of why a contemporary audience might have responded favourably to a particular film, as opposed to another that was on offer at the same time. The ‘historical materialist’ method of Staiger (1992) utilizes many sources in order to recover some sense of the range of meanings a film might have had for its different audiences, on the grounds that:

… cultural artefacts are not containers with immanent meanings, that variations among interpretations have historical bases for their differences, and that differences and change are not idiosyncratic but due to social, political, and economic conditions, as well as to constructed identities such as gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, class and nationality.

(Staiger 1992: xi)

This issue will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. However, at this stage it is important to establish the principle of a line of enquiry which begins with a question and broadens rather than limits the range of source material which must be evaluated in order to offer an interpretation.

The same process – an enquiry generating the need to examine many and varied source materials as well as considering a range of theoretical models which might be pertinent to that enquiry – can be undertaken with the study of film stars. In Chapter 5, an exploration of the career of Margaret Lockwood suggests a more extensive consideration of the role of film stars as bearers of national identity. Research on film stars is a well-established area of Film Studies and provides an excellent example of the need to broaden out from the film text. As the work of Dyer (1987) has shown, the most productive star analyses involve not only scrutiny of the films but also of fan magazines, newspapers, gossip columns, other evidence of contemporary discourses and relevant theoretical insights (see, for example, his chapter on Marilyn Monroe with its consideration of pin-up photographs, novels and contemporary investigations on sex and sexuality, in reference to Foucault, psychoanalytic and feminist theories). Research on British film stars lags behind studies of Hollywood’s stars, but the possibilities are just as rich. Diaries and personal papers are useful as well as interviews and published autobiographies. Critics’ reviews provide a key intertext for genre studies and must be read with particular care to account for their authors’ biases and their publishers’ perspectives. As Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate, similar caution must be taken with fan magazines and material relating to audiences’ reactions to films. It will become apparent that these interrelated areas extend outwards to surrounding contexts which can be more difficult to assess. The historian, however, must always be aware of how film as a system relates to the wider social, economic and political arena.

Studies of American cinema have paid far greater attention to questions of historiographical methodology than those of British cinema (see also Allen and Gomery 1985; Thompson and Bordwell 1994: i-xlii; and Klenotic 1994). While film as an international medium displays some common characteristics relating to technology, the demands of the market-place, star-systems, the dynamics of genre and the co-existence of art-house and popular audiences, British cinema nevertheless contains some intriguing possibilities which relate to its own particular experience. It is plausible that British cinema’s inferior status in terms of commerce and culture contributed to a theoretical and methodological impasse as far as critical writing was concerned. While Hollywood and art cinema received the lion’s share of critical attention, only a handful of British films were deemed to be worthy of analysis by critics until the publication of Raymond Durgnat’s pioneering book A Mirror For England in 1970. However, it still has taken some time for varieties of British cinema to be embraced by the ‘cultural field’ of film studies.

In this book Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) concept of ‘the field of cultural production’ will be utilized on several occasions. It is useful here because it is applicable to the ‘field’ of Film Studies. In Bourdieu’s terms film, as an object of study, is governed by a plethora of institutional interests which compete with each other for domination. As an academic discipline, Film Studies has therefore been dominated by particular types of analyses, methods of criticism and the study of particular national cinemas, directors and stars. The preponderance of American Film Studies departments, together with the ascendancy of auteur theories, can be seen to have restricted the boundaries of film teaching and research to a concentration on Hollywood and European ‘art’ cinema. As the ‘field’ changes, however, that domination is being challenged by new work on ‘other’ cinemas and by the introduction of new conceptual areas.

As well as advocating such an approach to film history, this book will demonstrate how film-related documents can be ‘read’ as intertexts. Their importance is taken as given, in agreement with the proposition that, ‘study of sources alone does not make history; but without the study of sources there is no history’ (Marwick 1970: 131–2). As Catterall and Jones (1994) have shown, different types of documents require different reading strategies. The following chapters will analyse a variety of documents ranging from official government memoranda to fan magazines and discussions on the Internet. Their selection is related to key themes and contexts in British cinema history: relations with the government, the activities of the British Board of Film Censors, the film industry and its press, key personalities and their papers, film stars, and the cinema public, audiences and fans. Films will be analysed where appropriate, but it is stressed that the focus of this book is on the documents which can be used to elucidate the filmic context (a film can, of course, be a document). Similar methodological processes must be undertaken in film analysis, and the films in question should always be an important part of intertextual analysis. It is the aim of this book, however, to suggest how material often regarded as extraneous can contribute to our understanding of film in its cultural and historical context. While the concept of ‘hierarchies of discourses’ is common to the study of an individual film text, a similar approach can be applied to the study of relevant contextual material. As Kellner (1997) has noted, documents can be studied as ‘representations’:

to read research operations as the practice of a rhetoric is to maintain that the ‘facts’ of history (about which there is generally no dispute) are not the ‘givens’, but rather the ‘takens’, so to speak. These facts are ‘taken’ in large part from the language and cultural understanding within which they must be expressed, and thus possess a literary dimension that invades the very act of research itself.

(Kellner, in Jenkins 1997: 137)

Documents which are relevant to a particular film, issue or personality acquire significance because of a specific set of circumstances which have determined their existence and survival. ‘Dominant’ discourses (for example, opinions and policies generated by politicians or civil servants) survive because of their perceived importance ‘in the national interest’: they are available for study in the Public Record Office and are written in language which equates with ‘the voice of truth’. As we shall see in the case of cinema, dominant critical traditions survive because they have access to the dominant channels of information: newspapers, radio and fan magazines. On the other hand, other opinions, including those of ordinary cinema-goers, are seldom recorded, but they are no less valid or ‘truthful’ to the period/film/issue in question than the more readily accessible official documents. An integration of the various sources which have relevance to the study of cinema would therefore be appropriate, as would a working recognition of their already historicized status as ‘facts’ of the past (Jenkins 1997:19).

The following basic methodological issues apply to all documents, whether they are statistical surveys, governmental reports, diaries, or even posters and other ephemera, and should be uppermost in the researcher’s mind. In the case-studies which follow they will be applied to a wide range of documentation as ‘traces’ of the past:

1 Type What sort of document is it? What kind of language is it written in? This will alert the researcher to the ‘status’ of the document, and the likely prejudices it might conceal. Some types of document attempt to establish themselves at the top of the ‘hierarchy’ by purporting to be neutral/truthful. Memoranda written by civil servants, for example, are typically characterized by a semblance of neutrality and, in the case of film, appear to be disconnected from cultural considerations. As we shall see in Chapter 2, however, on closer analysis this is far from the case; many controversial themes or far-reaching policies have been couched in bureaucratic language which conceals deep-seated contradictions and tensions. Similarly, while statistical surveys are often presented as ‘neutral’ lists of numbers with brief commentary, Chapter 6 shows that they are just as susceptible to the ideological persuasions of their sponsors. The researcher must therefore be alert to the various nuances contained in uses of language, particularly those which aim to give an impression of coherence, logic and finality. Foucault’s call for ‘effective history’ implies such a strategy in order to disrupt histories which emphasize continuities and progress, ‘a voiceless obstinacy towards a millennial ending’ (Foucault, in Jenkins 1997: 124). In this sense, while many documents may give the impression of ‘adding up’ to a coherent picture, the film historian cannot be absolutely sure that this is the case; an approach is required which is dissective rather than accumulative – as Foucault puts it, knowledge that is made for ‘cutting’ rather than ‘understanding’.

2 Authorship Who has written the document? Who was the intended reader? These questions are important because discovering ‘the author’ is not always as straightforward as it might seem. Although a particular person might have written a report, letter or diary entry, they might be subject to influences which make their sole ‘authorship’ questionable. In Film Studies ‘authorship’ has long been a contentious concept and this is no less applicable regarding related forms of expression. When, for example, a film critic is writing a review, it is seldom an unadulterated opinion, but is part of an apparatus of critical discourse which might, at any one time, privilege a certain type of film or group of directors. As we shall see, this was evident in the 1940s when the ascendancy of the British film critical establishment ensured that to be perceived as ‘British’ a film had to contain a particular set of aesthetic and philosophical attributes which had been consistently praised by these critics for a number of years. So, while the ‘author’ might be Roger Manvell, his ‘authorship’ can be analysed in relation to his place in the critical establishment and in relation to the establishment’s opposition to other, less dominant but nevertheless competing conceptions of what a ‘British’ film should represent. Asking questions about the intended readership of a document is important because this influences the style of writing. As illustrated in Chapter 4, minutes written by civil servants which they knew would not be read by anyone but their colleagues for many years tend to break with the ‘neutral’ discourse of reports or letters to politicians. They are more personal and candid, and often reveal something of the problems, contradictions and tensions which the other documents seek to conceal. The Bernstein questionnaire surveys analysed in Chapter 6 were largely propaganda exercises for British cinema; their intended audience was the film trade and Hollywood; and this ‘placing’ of statistics occurred at a crucial time for the British film industry. This specific audience therefore determined much of the surveys’ composition, presentation and publicity.

3 Agency Why was it written? What was its purpose? Again, there is often a ‘gap’ between a document’s ostensible purpose and its real purpose, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and documents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The texts and methods of film history(ies)
• 2 Celluloid diplomacy: British film and official policy
• 3 ‘What a difference a war makes!’: Love on the Dole (1941) and British film censorship
• 4 Filippo Del Giudice, Chance of a Lifetime (1950) and British cinema in the 1940s
• 5 Documents of fandom: Margaret Lockwood and Ewan McGregor
• 6 The British cinema audience
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Major sources for the study of British cinema
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index