Directory of World Cinema Britain Volume 14

By Emma Bell, Neil Mitchell

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-557-2

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Film of the Year,
The King’s Speech,
Award of the Year,
Harry Potter,
The Pioneers,
British Silent Cinema,
Industrial Spotlight,
British Film Studios,
Women in British Cinema,
Cultural Crossover,
Multiculturalism in British Cinema,
On Location,
Brighton and Hove,
Directors,
David Lean,
Powell and Pressburger,
Shane Meadows,
Melodrama,
Essay,
Reviews,
Crime,
Essay,
Reviews,
Comedy,
Essay,
Reviews,
Heritage,
Essay,
Reviews,
Horror,
Essay,
Reviews,
Sci-Fi,
Essay,
Reviews,
Social Realism,
Essay,
Reviews,
Film Culture Focus,
British Arthouse Cinemas,
Arthouse,
Essay,
Reviews,
Documentary,
Essay,
Reviews,
Scotland,
Essay,
Reviews,
Wales,
Essay,
Reviews,
Northern Ireland,
Essay,
Reviews,
Recommended Reading,
British Cinema Online,
Test Your Knowledge,
Notes on Contributors,
Filmography,

CHAPTER 1

FILM OF THE YEAR

THE KING’S SPEECH

The King’s Speech

Studio/Distributor: Seesaw
Bedlam/Momentum

Director: Tom Hooper

Producers: Ian Canning
Gareth Unwind
Emile Sherman

Screenwriter: David Seidler

Cinematographer: Danny Cohen

Production Designer: Eve Stewart

Composer: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Tariq Anwar

Duration: 118 minutes

Genre: Heritage

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter
Colin Firth
Derek Jacobi
Geoffrey Rush

Year: 2010

Synopsis

Prince Albert, the second son of King George V, must give a speech at the closing of the 1925 Empire Exhibition, held at a packed Wembley Stadium. His stammer causes him to fail pitiably. Initially acting under the alias ‘Mrs Johnson’, his wife engages the services of Lionel Logue, an unorthodox Australian speech therapist who specializes in curing stammers. Logue and Prince Albert begin a complex and tempestuous working relationship, and Logue proves invaluable in helping Albert overcome his anxieties.

George V dies and Albert’s older brother becomes King Edward VIII, beginning the abdication crisis that unexpectedly brings Albert’s ascension to the throne. The stress on Albert, now King George VI, increases as he is forced to speak at his coronation and, again, upon the outbreak of WWII. The morale of his subjects depends upon him delivering a crucial nine-minute speech, broadcast live on radio, to the entire Empire.

Critique

An Oscar-laden triumph for the recently dissolved UK Film Council (UKFC), The King’s Speech is another of the well-acted, high-end dramas decorated with impeccable period detail of the type that has become a feature of British film-making since the 1980s. The King’s Speech generally avoids the over-seriousness that hampers other heritage films, though, through its strong comic sensibility, there are several good gags and numerous Pygmalionesque scenes of speech therapy.

A film like this will always be judged on the performances of its leads and, by that measure, The King’s Speech is superb. Both Colin Firth as ‘Bertie’ (Prince Albert, later King George VI) and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue give admirable depth to characters that could quickly become cliché-ridden. Bertie could slide into a mess of ticks and tantrums; Firth moulds him into a believable and fragile man whose suffering and self-doubt are unique, but easy to identify with. Logue could dissolve into an absurdly hammy antipodean version of Henry Higgins; Rush ensures he has both strength and fragility. If their interactions occasionally suffer from thoughts that only in a film could an eccentric commoner persuade a staid king to dance, sing and swear his way through speeches, these are dispelled by the conviction with which the sequences in question are acted, and the memory that this is based upon a true story.

The casting is clever. Michael Gambon, with his stage actor’s voice and gravitas, makes the part of George V seem far larger than it is, and makes Bertie’s tales of growing up fearing his father believable. The choice of Guy Pearce, an Australian, to play a king of England feels, at first, an odd one but it enhances the presentation of King Edward VIII as an international playboy irreconcilably different from his overtly English brother. Helena Bonham Carter, as Queen Elizabeth, has both the haughtiness to play a woman whose snobbishness borders on bigotry and the gentleness to make her charming.

The film falters when it strays into unrestrained solemnity. By the time of the King’s address to the Empire, most of the most of the jokes have stopped and one has the impression that the fate of the free world depends upon Bertie’s ability to give a single speech without stammering. Early on, the film emphasizes the enormousness of the impact Bertie’s speech impediment has upon him, the Royal Family and its inner circle; late in the film the audience are asked to believe the issue seems equally enormous to all the members of a nation that has just declared war on the Nazis. Even so, director Tom Hooper merits great praise for constructing an extended scene of a man standing in a small room talking into a microphone as engaging and emotional as the climactic moments of ‘rise of the underdog’ films with which The King’s Speech shares its structure. Such assuredness pervades the production.

Scott Jordan Harris

CHAPTER 2

AWARD OF THE YEAR

HARRY POTTER

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is an independent body that supports the moving image arts and industry in Britain. The Academy holds an annual award ceremony that celebrates excellence and achievements in the film industry, and presents awards in categories such as Best Film, Best Director and Best Costume Designer.

In 2011, the Academy garlanded the Harry Potter series with the ‘Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema’ award. The series comprises eight films adapted from children’s novels by JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), Chamber of Secrets (2002), Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Goblet of Fire (2005), Order of the Phoenix (2007), Half-Blood Prince (2009) and The Deathly Hallows Part I (2010) and Part II (2011). Throughout the films, the young orphan Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) discovers he has magical talents when he is liberated from his normal ‘Muggle’ (non-magical) home and summoned to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. At Hogwarts, Harry meets Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Grainger (Emma Watson), who become his best friends, and his mentor, Professor Dumbledore (Richard Harris/Michael Gambon). Harry soon learns that he is fated to battle his nemesis, the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who killed his parents. Harry, Ron and Hermione must quest for magical objects, escape labyrinths, and defeat a bestiary of monsters to find all of the pieces of Voldemort’s soul and destroy them before he gains enough power to take over the magical world.

While there are disagreements about what constitutes a ‘British’ film, Harry Potter signified a major shift in those debates; as a 2009 UK Film Council report states: ‘different legal and fiscal definitions [of British film] have been used since the 1930s, for the purposes of quota fulfilment, and tax relief and subsidy eligibility, but the debate has, if anything, become more intense in the era of the globally successful Harry Potter adaptations’ (UK Film Council, 2009:12). Harry Potter not only demonstrates excellence in British film-making, but also exemplifies the contemporary social, industrial and economic conditions within which British cinema operates.

Beginning in 2001, the Harry Potter series took over a decade to complete and employed over 2000 people. It is owned by Warner Bros and American funded, directed by both British and American directors, (Chris Columbus, Mike Newall, David Yates), and much of the profits are reaped abroad. Yet the films are adapted from British source material, used British settings, myths and characters, were produced by Englishman David Heyman and, at author JK Rowling’s request, principally employed British talent. The films were set in Britain, having been shot in Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire and locations including Alnwick Castle, Oxford University and King’s Cross Station. Harry Potter showcased a wealth of British acting talent including Richard Harris, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Maggie Smith and Ralph Fiennes, as well as making international stars of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. The creative excellence of those working on the Harry Potter films has earned countless nominations and awards from film institutions and festivals across the globe. To date, Harry Potter is the most profitable film franchise and has generated a phenomenal fan culture and a multi-billion-dollar industry of tie-in products, merchandise and even a theme park.

Harry Potter draws on recognisable and exportable aspects of Britishness to construct the sense of place and culture of its two worlds. The dreary world of the ‘Muggles’ is the unreconstructed Middle England suburbia of ‘Little Whinging’ and metropolitan landmarks, whereas the magical world is a Dickensian England of cobbled streets with cluttered old shops, boarding schools, creepy little villages, Arthurian enchantment, ancient folklore, quaint villages, wild forests and ageless castles. The two worlds, then, form a touristic brochure of iconic British spaces: King’s Cross Station, London Zoo, London buses, thatched cottages, etc. These locations are nostalgic, picturesque and whimsical ideals of antiquated and middle-class Britishness for home and international audiences alike. Indeed, in an attempt to boost trade, the British Tourist Authority produced a ‘Potter Map of Britain’ that entices visitors to visit locations, including central London, Alnwick Castle, Oxford University, Durham Cathedral, as well as the Glenfinnan Viaduct and Glencoe in Scotland.

Set in the magical mirror of an upper-class boarding school, Harry Potter is also a very British narrative fantasy of class mobility. Harry’s near-Dickensian twist of fate takes him from his lowly and lonely status in the world of ‘Muggles’ to significance, empowerment, friendship and material privilege at Hogwarts. The infrastructure of the magical world parodies British state bureaucracy, finance and class, such as the intractable, and corrupt Ministry of Magic, the oppressive and humourless goblin-run Gringott’s Bank and the system of class privilege that distinguishes even magical families, from the aristocratic self-interested Malfoys to the lowly, loveable Weasleys.

It is, then, problematic to define the Harry Potter films as straightforwardly ‘British’ and they are generally seen as British-American co-productions. International audiences do not always perceive them as British due to ‘the scale and production values’ which are more often associated with American film-making (UK Film Council, 2009: 64). As such, Harry Potter may exemplify ‘one of Britain’s new cinematic identities which seems to oscillate between UK and US cultures’ (ibid: 66).

Emma Bell

CHAPTER 3

THE PIONEERS

In the nineteenth century, inventors across Europe and America experimented with photographic motion picture technologies, producing sequential images that could be animated in a variety of ways. For example, in 1889, British patent number 10,131, entitled ‘Improved Apparatus for Taking Photographs in Rapid Series’, was granted to William Friese-Greene. For the time, it appeared to be an astonishing machine as it was one of the first patents for a cinematographic camera. Unfortunately, the device was too slow – some say only 5 frames a second – which meant that the successful illusion of movement from projected image to image was never achieved. While Friese-Greene was not the inventor of cinema, his accomplishment was to be an active contributor to the evolution of the concept of cinema in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

The ambition to create moving pictures was realized technically and commercially in the 1890s in the United States by the Edison Company of West Orange, New Jersey. While the beginnings of what one might consider ‘cinema-proper’ is usually credited to the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 Cinématographe show in Paris, where they projected films to a paying audience, the first real ‘films’ to be commercially exhibited in the UK were American in origin, produced using a Kinetograph and designed for use in the Kinetoscope. Largely the invention of the engineer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson at the Edison Laboratory, the Kinetoscope was a film viewer driven by an electric motor that enabled a single user to view a single 40-foot length of 35mm celluloid nitrate film with a duration of 25–30 seconds. (The 35mm gauge was established by Dickson and is still the dominant film gauge).

The first Kinetoscope parlour opened in London at 70 Oxford Street on 17 October 1894. The Times newspaper described the parlour as having ten machines and named five of the films on display: Blacksmith’s Shop, Carmencita, Annabelle Serpentine Dance, Wrestling Scene and Cock Fight. The preparation for the filming had ranged from the very simple, such as the Annabelle dance film where the solo dancer performed to camera in the undecorated and naturally-lit interior of the black tar paper studio, to the more elaborate Blacksmith’s Shop. The Times newspaper described the latter as: ‘One scene represents a blacksmith’s shop in full operation, with three men hammering iron on an anvil, and who stop in their work to take a drink. Each drinks in turn and passes the pot of beer to the other. The smoke from the forge is seen to rise most perfectly’ (‘The Kinetoscope’, The Times, 18 October 1894: 4). These representations of working lives and popular culture provided a very distinctive portrait of American life: here was a very masculine world-view that was interested in the physicality of modern life. The Edison Company conceived of the films as products for national and international consumption and as perfect vehicles for displaying the new medium’s potential.

Edison had only patented the Kinetograph (the film camera) as he was confident that no one would be able to produce films without the use of his film camera. However, Edison underestimated the ingenuity of the young London-based electrical engineer, Robert Paul (1869–1943). From April 1895, advertisements in the English Mechanic heralded a real and significant challenge to the Edison attempt to monopolize Kinetoscope film production.

In the 5 April 1895 issue of the English Mechanic journal, Paul placed this advertisement: ‘Kinetoscopes and Films. New Topical Subjects daily. Large stock. List free. Paul, 44 Hatton Garden, London’ (English Mechanic 61:1567, 5 April 1895: vi). Paul was not only announcing the availability of his version of the Edison Kinetoscope but also that he had succeeded in producing his own films. It is more than likely that this was the first announcement of the first British-made 35 mm films produced on the film camera devised by Paul and Birt Acres. A fortnight later, Paul’s advertisement named the subject of one of his Kinetoscope films: Boat Race, 1895. This was the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race of 30 March 1895 and was probably the first time that the name of a British film had been published (English Mechanic 61:1569, 19 April 1895: vi).

Paul’s advertisements in the English Mechanic announced effectively the beginning of the British film industry. Paul had succeeded in making his own version of the Kinetoscope and then created, with Acres, a 35mm film camera. Some of the Paul/Acres’ films were similar in style and content to the Edison/Dickson studio films produced at the Black Maria, such as works like Carpenter’s Shop and Boxing Kangaroo. However, what distinguished these first British films were the use of locations and the recording of two significant national events – the Boat Race film and another film of the Derby horse race. These new films possessed a very particular sense of national identity and culture.

1896 marked the first year of film projection in Britain, and Paul led this initiative. In that year, his work was screened in theatres in over thirty British towns and cities. Freed from the single person film viewer, Paul’s work demonstrated the new medium’s magical control over space and time. It may well have personified, for some, the excitement of modern life, the promise of the next century and the summit of British technology and imagination. Paul’s new, illustrious status was confirmed by The Strand Magazine, an illustrated monthly, which devoted an article to the making of Paul’s Derby film in its edition of August 1896. This feature, with its seventeen-frame illustrations from the film, stated, ‘the great race, as depicted by Mr. Paul’s animatographe, is a veritable marvel of modern photography and mechanism’ (‘The Prince’s Derby – Shown by Lightning Photography’, The Strand Magazine 12, August 1896:140).

The publication of Paul’s advertisement for the creation of the new company to be known as ‘Paul’s Animatographe, Limited,’ was dramatic evidence of Paul’s business confidence. The advertisement, which in fact was the abridged prospectus, was over 1000 words in length and began with the astonishing declaration that, from March 1896 to March 1897, his business had ‘yielded a Nett Profit of £12,838 15s. 4d., on a capital of about £1000, or 1,200 per cent’ (The Era 24 April 1897: 8; The Economist 24 April 1897: iii).

Cecil Hepworth, who would start his own film production company in 1899, used his column in the Amateur Photographer in early 1897 to criticize film. He believed it to be a medium without a future. However, he reversed his position as a result of Paul’s prospectus. ‘More than once I have aired the opinion in this column that animated photography is getting played out. That I was utterly and hopelessly wrong in so soliloquizing is now proved – or near proved.’ Animated photography, as Paul’s prospectus asserted, was ‘one of the greatest attractions the world of amusement has ever had and it is enjoying a phenomenal success.’ It was a medium with ‘great possibilities’, and this was the moment ‘to develop the resources of the invention, and to extend its present lucrative field of operation’ (Hepworth 1897: 374).

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