A “disappointingly thin filling” or a period of immense change?

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Described as “a disappointingly thin filling” coming in between the critical and commercial successes of the previous and the following decades, the 1970s have until recently been a much neglected and dismissed period of British cinema. After 1968, the annus mirabilis when eighty-five per cent of British productions were fuelled by American capital, we can see a break in patterns. Thus the decade brought significant changes to the British film industry and urged a desperate quest for identity, self-definition and a way out of the decline. What is British cinema? What makes a film British? What are the attributes of national cinema? And what is the role of national cinema in contemporary society? These were the most important questions posed by scholars and critics whose attention—after the opening of WWII archives and files related to cinema—turned towards the golden age of British film. The new research projects brought along marked changes in the course of studying film history, which, eventually led to the recognition of film history as an academic discipline and made visible two distinctive schools of analyzing national representations. In my paper I discuss the impact of the revisionist approaches of the ‘empiricists’, on the one hand, and the ‘theorists’, on the other, on the understanding of British cinema since the 1980s. To illustrate the approaches of the two schools I will discuss two alternative readings of Chariots of Fire (1981).

The most striking thing one encounters when reading about the 1970s in Great Britain is the lack of positive adjectives. Andy Beckett gave the title When the Lights Went Out (2009) to his book on the political and social issues of the period, and described the Seventies as a “period of doom and gloom” for the whole of Britain.

Inevitably this was a period of a series of crises. An economic crisis and especially the two oil crises (1973 and 1979) hit the western world and shook people’s feelings of comfort and stability. In Britain, as the result of the economic crisis, racial tension began to grow even though the number of immigrants coming to the country did not increase in this period. It was the bad economy which made immigrants more ‘visible’

and made their presence more discomforting, particularly for the unemployed.

Nationalism also began to rise in Northern-Ireland and culminated in a renewed outbreak of the Anglo-Irish conflict, which turned Northern-Ireland, especially the streets of Belfast, into a battlefield. Neither the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath (1970–1974) nor his Labour successor Harold Wilson was able to tackle the problems effectively. As Tom Nairn remarked in The Break-Up of Britain, Great Britain in the Seventies showed “rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic

stagnation, social decay and cultural despair” (51). The accelerated spread of multi-national companies and globalization also contributed to a serious identity crisis and a quest for defining or redefining such hitherto often used but never really defined terms as ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’.

The British film industry in the 1970s

The “period of doom and gloom” was even more apparent in the British filmmaking industry, except that the crisis had hit the industry even earlier, and consequently British cinema’s quest for identity coincided with its struggle for survival. Sue Harper suggested in her keynote lecture on Seventies British Cinema held at the University of Exeter in 2007 that the 1970s actually started in 1968 (23). Harper suggests that the Seventies, in fact, lasted until Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, while others would argue that the Seventies ended with the Oscar winning success of Chariots of Fire (1981) by director Hugh Hudson. 1968, or the annus mirabilis as Harper referred to it, is a major landmark since this was the very year when eighty-five per cent of the films were financed by subsidiaries of major American studios but right after that the majority of the American funding was withdrawn from British productions. This meant that the industry faced its most severe crisis and mostly television productions and small independent productions kept filmmaking alive in Great Britain (Newland 23). This lack of financial resources led to a marked decline in production, which was the main reason why the Seventies has become the most neglected period ever in the history of British cinema. So neglected is the period that there have only been very few books written about it. Alexander Walker’s National Heroes and John Walker’s The Once and Future Film were both published in 1985. The third publication, Seventies British Cinema edited by Robert Shail arrived only in 2008. The most recent book, which aimed at turning our attention back to this period, is Paul Newland’s Don’t Look Now (2010): a collection of papers delivered at the above-mentioned conference in Exeter, which was exclusively devoted to the cinema of the Seventies in Britain and aimed at rediscovering what really was going on in the film industry in that “dark period”.

It was not only the withdrawal of the American funding that made the Seventies seem so disregarded but also the fact that this decade, described as a

“disappointingly thin filling” by Newland (14), was sandwiched between the critically acclaimed English New Wave and the international commercial successes of the 1980s heritage films.¹ The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed the British New Wave, which had, in fact, very little impact on world cinema but reformed domestic filmmaking: it made domestic productions step out of the closed world of London

1 The beginning of the English New Wave is linked to Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959) and John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) marks the end of it. However, some filmmakers, notably Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, have managed to keep the traditions of the New Wave alive to date. The contemporary drama series of the BBC called Play For Today also managed to preserve the best achievements of the New Wave. Play For Today started in 1970 and produced over three hundred contemporary television dramas. The number of shows dropped dramatically by the early 1980s and consequently the series came to an end in 1984 (see also Newland 165–198; Badder; Cushmann).

studios and focus on social issues raised by contemporary writers. These adaptations made by mostly leftist directors relied on new talent from outside the prestigious London drama schools. Their socially engaged movies won the acclaim of a new generation of critics grouped around Sight and Sound (edited by Lindsay Anderson and Penelope Houston, started in 1952), but they did not offer a sustainable formula for the British film industry to win international recognition, not to mention international commercial success. Without the latter it is very difficult to keep the industry alive in any country which is unable to sport a sizable domestic market.

The trends of the New Wave were unsustainable also because the swinging Sixties and the buzzing life of London, the Beatles and the unexpected hype around the James Bond series offered more excitement,² and the kitchen sink dramas did not provide marketable images of Britain for an international appeal. The foggy and rainy streets of northern industrial cities and the everyday lives of workers of the steel industry represented in these films did not attract many international viewers, and did not seem appealing for foreign tourists either, so consequently did not invite any foreign investment—unlike swinging London, which immediately attracted the attention of American Studios. Studio executives, seeing the commercial successes of such films as, for example, Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) or A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964) were happy to invest in British productions, especially in films linked to the British record companies, predominantly EMI.³ However, the majority of their large-scale investments failed (see Newland 13) and it turned out that the studios backed some of the biggest and most expensive failures of the decade.⁴ No wonder that the US studios decided to withdraw funding after 1968. In 1971, 98 British productions were registered according to Linda Wood and 96 according to the BFI’s Screenonline database. The number of British films fell to one third by 1981:

36 films according to Wood (143) and only 24 according to the BFI’s Screenonline database (“Facts”).

Without foreign investors, by the early 1970s the British film industry was left to its own devices and spent a decade trying to find a way out of this crisis. In this period, British movie theatres were kept alive by American blockbusters such as The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), which actually increased cinema-going. However, by the beginning of the 1980s, due mostly to the spread of home movie channels and VCRs, the number of cinema goers dropped markedly both in Britain and in the US.

2 The Bond phenomenon started with Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962), followed by From Russia With Love (Terence Young 1963), Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964), Thunderball (Terence Young 1965), You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert 1967) in the 1960s. It is still one of the most profitable franchises in the history of cinema.

3 The record company EMI first showed interest in film production in the 1970s when it first acquired the Association British Picture Corporation and later, in 1976, the British Lion Film Corporation.

British Lion was established in 1919.

4 For instance, The Battle of Britain (Guy Hamilton, 1969), Cromwell (Ken Hughes, 1970), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Herbert Ross, 1969) and Half a Sixpence (George Sydney, 1967). At the same time, in the USA, such films as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), which was clearly made on a shoestring (only 400 000 USD was the total production cost) gained critical acclaim and appealed to the audiences at home and abroad, multiplying its modest budget at the box office.

Opening of the National Film Archives

As we could see the 1970s could be described as the period of the British Film Industry’s quest for identity and desperate search for a way to reinvigorate domestic production and keep audiences in the movie theatres. Filmmakers were in search of a sustainable formula. The answer came from an earlier era and could be linked to the opening of the National Film Archives in Britain. The opening of the National Film Archives and the release of the records of the Ministry of Information (MOI)’s Film Division under the Thirty Year Rule are probably the most important reasons why the Seventies deserve more attention (Chapman, “Cinema”). This was what made the decade one of the key periods in British Cinema, and even more so of film studies as they opened up new possibilities for scholars and made new approaches to studying and writing about films possible. Although not necessarily in a direct way, the studies showed a route for the film industry out of the crisis by the coming of the next decade.

Above all, the systematic study of the collections of the film archives and of the MOI’s film related documents reinvigorated ideology-free empiricist study of films coming especially from the 1930s and the Second World War era. These films offered a formula, a key to success pattern from the golden ages of British Cinema.

The Thirties and Forties can be described not only as the golden age of British Cinema but also as the golden age of the British costume drama. These period pieces, including historical films, period melodramas and some occasional adaptations were immensely popular in and outside of Britain—especially in the US market—for their lavish period costumes and spectacular sets, the Shakespeare-trained British cast, and the insight they offered into the private lives of famous historical figures or for their enjoyable renderings of the finest of British literature. The makers of these films knew exactly what images of Britain the foreign audiences were most interested in and how to market their country’s best assets, i.e. its rich literary and theatrical traditions, its history and historical sites. Instead of the considerably innovative contemporary dramas of the British New Wave, filmmakers and historians found a way out of the crisis of the Seventies by returning to the tradition of the costume dramas, thus producing marketable images of the country, as Thomas Elsaesser pointed out in his influential essay “Images For Sale: The New British Cinema”.

The first wave of revisionism: the empiricists

In the course of studying films from the Seventies, ‘empiricists’ such as Jeffrey Richards, Anthony Aldgate and Nicholas Pronay began the systematic study of the treasures of the archives claiming that in order to get a complex and overall picture of the films the context of their production circumstances, and their political, cultural and movie market contexts should be studied carefully as well. The best way for that is by reading all relevant documents such as production notes, budget calculations, box-office reports, reviews and audience attendances together with interviews with the filmmakers, producers and stars (Richards 21–34). This approach can also be seen in the writings of Charles Barr and Andrew Higson in the Seventies. Empiricists of

the decade with the leadership of Richards grouped around the prestigious Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, started in 1981. Among the members of the group we find Nicholas Pronay, Anthony Aldgate, Vincent Porter, Sue Harper, and the co-editors of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Philip Taylor and Kenneth Short. These historians were all engaged in the study of the collections of the archives and the MOI records, including all the film related official government documents, critical writings and writings of film publications, the statistical data of Mass Observation and other empirical studies (Richards 21–34). They were all committed to historical investigation but recognized that history is neither neutral nor objective (Ashby and Higson 12).

The significance of the empirical research and study lies in the method itself which concentrated on facts and figures rather than on the ideology of the era but was aware of the fact that “[h]istory is never simply the amassing of empirical facts, the accumulation of evidence” (Ashby and Higson 12). The empiricists managed to free their writings of the critical biases of the “old film historians” such as Roger Manvell, Paul Rotha, Basil Wright and critics of the previous generation such as C.A. Lejeune, Dilys Powell and Richard Winnington, who were mainly concerned with realism and the notions of quality (Chapman, “Cinema” 194). “The rigorous scholarship has done much to revise the critical prejudices and assumptions of the earlier generation of writers about how successful certain films were.” (Chapman, “Cinema” 195) As a result of the empirical studies the whole national film corpus was taken under revision and representatives of popular cinema gained acceptance into the national film canon.

The second wave of revisionism: the theorists

The reinvigorated empirical studies laid the foundations for a new critical approach, which was similarly rooted in the increased interest in the contents of the National Film Archives and the opening of the MOI records, but also took a big leap from the strictly scientific approach of the empirical studies. The representatives of the new critical approach were film theorists rather than film historians, hence the name: ‘the theorists’ or ‘the revisionist theorists’ (Chapman, “Cinema” 196). This school came into effect in the 1980s. Starting from the Seventies, film history and film theory began to get closer to each other, which eventually led to the acceptance of film history as an academic discipline. The main reason for the birth of this new approach was that the systematic study of the films in the Seventies brought to light some shortcomings of the empirical methods (for example, the challenges of categorizing the increased number of films and new tendencies after the 1950s).

Some authors opened new prospects for studying films and rethinking British Cinema. The most influential of these writings were pointed out by Jeffrey Richards in “Rethinking British Cinema”: James Curran and Vincent Porter’s British Cinema History, Charles Barr’s All Our Yesterdays, Andrew Higson’s, Dissolving Views and Robert Murphy’s The British Cinema Book. It was also new to apply the concepts of genres for studying national cinema. Marcia Landy, Sarah Street and Robert Murphy’s writings are examples of analysing British cinema from the aspects of its

most popular genres. The horror genre, for example, was meticulously studied in books such as David Pirie’s A Heritage Horror (1973), Peter Hutchings’ Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (1993) and Denis Meikle’s A History of Horrors:

The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer (1996). The ever popular costume drama was also subjected to close examination for example in Sue Harper’s Picturing the Past (1994) which provided a model for genre analysis. Harper established a taxonomy to aid social, gender and class studies of the genre and mapped out the way these films functioned in the representation and consumption of history (Richards).

Most of these writers started working in the Seventies and their works were rooted in the empirical studies of that decade but they have managed to step away from the rigorous scientific research method and to take a major step closer to theoretical writings. The birth of theorist criticism took place in 1983 at a summer university course at Stirling University (30 July–6 August) organized by the British Film Institute and with the preceding evening lectures held at the National Film Theatre by Charles Barr, John Ellis, John Hill, and Bob Murphy (see Geraghty). The summer university course and the evening lectures resulted in a publication entitled:

“National Fictions: Struggles over the Meaning of WWII”. The main focus of their examinations were the popular genres, such as comedies and war films of WWII and of the Fifties, and films made during the Falkland crisis in 1982. Significantly, the new critical approach came into effect during the first years of the Thatcher era. The most outstanding representatives of theorist criticism were Christine Gledhill, Gillian Swanson, Andrew Higson, Geoff Hurd, Steve Neale, John Hill, and the most prominent scholar of the representation of identity was Stuart Hall (Geraghty 94).

The starting point of the examination of the films was the question of national identity, more specifically how national identity was represented in these films, and how national identity was constructed—especially in gender and class relations. The feminist reading of films provided the basis of the examinations which also raised issues concerning the representation of the past, history, nostalgia, collective memory and popular remembering (Geraghty 94). As Chapman explains, “[s]ome of the authors analyse particular films in respect of their representation of gender (Christine Gledhill, Gillian Swanson) or nationhood (Andrew Higson). Others are concerned with constructing an ideological basis for British wartime cinema (Jeff Hurd, Steve Neale)” (“Cinema” 196).

The theorists began to question the notion of such established concepts as national cinema and claimed that the very word ‘national’ should be subject to examination and called for a redefinition in the light of the political and social changes, globalization and the identity crisis of the Seventies. “What are the attributes of national cinema?” “What is the role of national cinema in contemporary society?”

“What is British cinema?” These were some of the questions raised. Without answering these questions it was impossible to establish a set of criteria for what makes a film typically British. After the opening of WWII archives and the MOI files

“What is British cinema?” These were some of the questions raised. Without answering these questions it was impossible to establish a set of criteria for what makes a film typically British. After the opening of WWII archives and the MOI files