CIN 3110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: François Truffaut, Stephen Frears, Cinematograph Films Act 1927
16 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
The History of British Cinema Class 1:
Nation:
• Bounded spatial territory OR
• Laws and legal systems, delimiting a national space
National film industry:
• Benedict Anderson: Nations formed by creating imagined communities.
• Benedict Anderson: spread of wildly diffused popular print culture. Beginnings of daily
newspaper. Interesting from perspective of media with written word and oral speech, but
also important in sense of national identity – people orienting themselves from the same
sense of national community. They all have updates every day.
• Imagined communities are produced by popular media, and the new popular medium is
the cinema.
Cinema in Britain
• About Britain’s vexed position between Hollywood and the cultural prestige and avant-
garde value of European film tradition.
• Britain is late to the film party.
• 1924- Headline on Bioscope (British film): “Lights Out” no British funded and directed
film was being made at that point.
• 1909: 30% of all films were American, 1914: 60%. 1926: 95%.
• 1927: government legislation to protect British films.
o Introduces quotas for the amount of British films on British screens. Needs at
least 7.5% of output to be British-made. Slowly increased. 1936 it was 20%.
o Protectionist measure of national industry.
• 1920s-30s: quota quickies: produced in order to meet quotas without care or attention.
Why British film gets a slow start. It tries to stimulate production, but the quality is low.
• Britain is based on the literary, also very theatrical, so film isn’t deemed prestigious.
Cultural capital attached to cinema only after this one guy
Francois Truffaut w/ Alfred Hitchcock in 1962
• “There’s something about England that’s anti-cinematic… Is somehow a deterrent to
strong emotion.”
• Not sublime enough. Sense of reserve.
Stephen Frears, on Truffaut
• “The great French film-maker, FT,.. bollocks to Truffaut.”
o Sense of punk attitude that Truffaut didn’t understand.
Lens: Between characters and landscapes
• Relationship between individual characters and their environments. Enables us to zoom
in and look at underlying ideas
• To a large extent, the characters we see are shaped by their environment. Behaviours
aren’t caused by environments, but they’re shaped/elicited by them.
o Lay a series of possible pathways in front of them
• Tension between character and environment.
• Movement between environments is important, too.
British Hitchcock (Before he left for Hollywood in 1940)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Nation: bounded spatial territory or, laws and legal systems, delimiting a national space. National film industry: benedict anderson: nations formed by creating imagined communities, benedict anderson: spread of wildly diffused popular print culture. Interesting from perspective of media with written word and oral speech, but also important in sense of national identity people orienting themselves from the same sense of national community. Imagined communities are produced by popular media, and the new popular medium is the cinema. 1926: 95%: 1927: government legislation to protect british films, introduces quotas for the amount of british films on british screens. Needs at least 7. 5% of output to be british-made. 1936 it was 20%: protectionist measure of national industry, 1920s-30s: quota quickies: produced in order to meet quotas without care or attention. It tries to stimulate production, but the quality is low: britain is based on the literary, also very theatrical, so film isn"t deemed prestigious.
