Waving the flag : constructing a national cinema in Britain /
Andrew Higson.
- Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1995.
- 1 online resource (xii, 322 pages) : illustrations
Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-315) and index. Filmography: pages 295-298.
British film culture and the idea of national cinema -- The Heritage Film, British cinema, and the national past: Comin' Thro' The Rye -- Economic competition and product differentiation-popular cinema and the film industry in the mid-1930s: Sing As We Go and Evergreen -- The documentary idea and the melodrama of everyday life-the public, the private, and the national family: Millions Like Us and This Happy Breed -- Constructing a national cinema in Britain: some conclusions.
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What does it mean to speak of a 'national' cinema? To what extent can British cinema, dominated for so many years by Hollywood, be considered a national cinema? Waving the Flag investigates these questions from a historical point of view, and challenges many of the received wisdoms of British cinema history. Drawing some revealing conclusions about the extent to which the many rich traditions of British film-making share the same distinctive stylistic and ideological characteristics, what emerges is a sometimes surprising picture of a specifically national cinema. Andrew Higson investigates theories of national cinema, and surveys the development of the British film industry and film culture. Three case studies combine histories of production and reception with textual analysis of key films from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Focusing on Cecil Hepworth's Comin' Thro' The Rye, the first of these looks at the evolution of an art cinema in the early 1920s. Two popular musical comedies of 1934, Sing As We Go and Evergreen, are then contrasted as the products of two quite distinct industrial strategies for coping with the overwhelming presence of Hollywood. Finally, the author reexamines the status of the documentary idea in British national cinema and looks at its influence on two Second World War films, Millions Like Us and This Happy Breed.
Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010.
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212