British film

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British film is a diverse and changing part of international film culture . While filmmakers from Great Britain had a decisive influence on the technical and artistic development of the new medium in the early years of film history , the following decades were repeatedly characterized by identity crises in the film industry and economic crises in the film industry, which were characterized by overdependence on the US film market stemmed from.

overview

Overview of the number of films produced in Great Britain from 1912 to 2001, data: bfi

British inventors were involved in the development of motion picture technology as early as the late 1880s and later contributed to the development of film artistic styles in the early years of cinema. After the First World War , however, foreign films became increasingly popular in Britain, leading to stagnation in British film production by the mid-1920s. The survival of the film industry was only secured through protectionist measures by the state. In the early 1930s, for example, the British film landscape was characterized by the cheaply filmed quota quickies that met the legally prescribed proportion of British films in the cinemas. But these films also led to an increased interest in the national productions, which then led to more ambitious projects. In particular, Alfred Hitchcock's films and a series of elaborate historical films were huge successes in the USA.

The start of the Second World War initially led to a decline in film production, with the focus initially being on making propaganda films . But under these conditions some of the most important British films were made; Directors like Michael Powell , Laurence Olivier or David Lean created their first major successes. The documentary film movement, which had developed under John Grierson in the early 1930s , also reached its peak during the war. At the end of the 1940s, however, there was a serious crisis when the US distributors boycotted the British market for six months. The film industry responded by focusing even more on the national market.

The following years were marked by war films , costume dramas and comedies . Ealing Studios set the standard for high society comedy, while the mid-1950s saw less ambitious comedies like the Doctor series and the Carry-on... films thrive. A revival of the horror film genre succeeded with the Hammer films . Some young filmmakers resisted this trivialization of the art of film, instead attempting to capture social realism in their Flushing Stone films. This British New Wave was short-lived and was quickly supplanted by the Swinging London phenomenon. American directors moved to Europe and successes such as Lawrence of Arabia or the James Bond films attracted American investors to Great Britain.

However, the recession at the end of the 1960s brought the boom to an abrupt end. Without American investors, British television was the only employer for many directors. The British film scene recovered briefly from the recession in the early 1980s, when new British production companies caused surprise successes. However, many of these films were only made with American support, which is why the British film industry suffered an even worse collapse in the mid-1980s than 15 years earlier. Only the independent film scene with artists like Peter Greenaway , Derek Jarman or Sally Potter ensured respectable success in this most difficult decade of British film.

The UK film industry was briefly revived in the mid-1990s with the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral . Costume dramas became fashionable again thanks to several literary adaptations, but Hollywood had once again exerted a major influence on the British film industry. After the end of the Thatcher era , public support for young filmmakers developed, but this only led to a few successes such as Trainspotting or Knave, Queen, King, Grass . Despite this support, however, British cinema today is so dependent on Hollywood that many consider it dead.

story

silent movie era

The beginnings

Birt Acres filming during the 1895 Epsom Derby

Although many consider the Lumière brothers ' first performances in December 1895 to be the birth of cinema, the development of the film medium began several years earlier. Based on the experiments of Eadweard Muybridge , who in 1872 had succeeded in photographing movement using series photography , the Leeds -based Frenchman Louis Le Prince constructed the first functioning film camera in 1888 . Independently of Le Prince, William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe developed their own cameras, with which they filmed street scenes in London in 1889 and 1890 . The major breakthrough in recording technology came in Thomas Alva Edison 's laboratories , where Scottish engineer William KL Dickson developed the kinetograph and kinetoscope . Edison released the first films in the USA in 1893, and a year later, on October 17, 1894, the first salon with kinetoscopes opened in London.

Since Edison had not patented his film camera in Great Britain, several inventors there tried to replicate the cinematograph. The most successful were Robert William Paul and Birt Acres , who made their first film recordings in the spring of 1895. After the Lumière brothers' work became known, Paul and Acres separately developed their own film projectors. Acres' first public showing with his projector was on January 14, 1896, followed by Paul on February 20, the same day as the Lumières in London.

Paul was the best at recognizing the potential of films as a new medium of entertainment and became the most successful British film producer of the late 19th century. He founded the first British film studio in London. Other studios in London, Brighton and Yorkshire soon followed . By the turn of the century Great Britain had developed into the third major film nation after the United States and France . Besides Paul, the most important film producers in England were George Albert Smith and Cecil Hepworth .

As a co-founder of the " Brighton School ", George Albert Smith became one of the most important innovators in the still young history of film. In 1899 he released a film called The Kiss in the Tunnel , which was one of the earliest examples of film montage . Experimenting with the possibilities of film editing, Smith released a series of films in 1900 that used close -ups and point-of-view shots as narrative devices. With stop-action and stop-motion effects, which were very popular at the time , spectacular films were made that were more like funny entertainment films.

However, the techniques consistently further developed by the film pioneers also made dramatic narrative forms possible. A Daring Daylight Burglary from 1903 shows a burglar being chased at high speed over several shots. This film has sold over 500 copies, including around 100 in the United States. Even more successful was the 1905 film Rescued by Rover , produced by Cecil Hepworth . The story of a dog rescuing a baby kidnapped by a gypsy was so popular that Hepworth had to reshoot the film twice to produce enough prints because the original negatives wore out too quickly. The theme of the film was picked up again and again by many filmmakers and remained popular for years.

In addition to new narrative forms, current affairs films also gained in importance. The funeral of Queen Victoria in February 1901 and the coronation of Edward VII a year later were media events that attracted film crews from around the world. One of the key producers for these early documentaries was Charles Urban , an American who settled in London in 1897.

stagnation

Scene from the 1916 documentary The Battle of the Somme

The early successes showed that by 1905 the British film industry was internationally competitive. It was felt that "the majority of films produced in the United States could not compete with British films". However, towards the end of the decade, British cinema did not develop artistically. While more complex films were made in other countries, the UK stuck with established forms for too long. Developing new film genres like the western in the USA or the slapstick comedy in France were not adapted by British filmmakers, only the series films ( serials ) with adventurers like "Lieutenant Daring" were adopted.

In the mid-1910s, the British film industry was struggling with economic problems for the first time. American films have become increasingly popular in Britain, while at the same time domestic film has become increasingly unattractive for lack of new talent and ideas. In 1914 only around 15 percent of the films shown in cinemas were of British origin, and many film theaters had signed exclusive contracts with American distributors. Established producers like Cecil Hepworth, on the other hand, were left with their films in the USA because their works no longer met the demands of the audience.

The British films of the 1910s were also rather backward in terms of acting level. The actors coming from the theater did not manage to develop their own style for the screen. Unlike in the leading film nations, there were only a few film stars . The most popular British film actor of the 1910s was Charles Chaplin , who was successful as a theater actor at home but was only discovered for the film in the United States. The actresses Chrissie White and Alma Taylor , discovered by Hepworth, were popular stars in their home country, but it was not until the early 1920s that Betty Balfour , the 'British Mary Pickford ', became an internationally successful film star in Britain.

The one area in which British cinema has continued to flourish has been in documentaries. Since 1910 newsreels have been shown regularly. A number of propaganda films were made during World War I. The most outstanding example is The Battle of the Somme in 1916, the first feature-length documentary to show the horrors of war with authentic footage of the trenches. The film was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World List in 2005. However, most of the documentaries of the 1910s were made to accompany lectures given by explorers. Almost every expedition was accompanied by a cameraman, most famously Ernest Henry Shackleton 's failed South Pole expedition , immortalized in the film South (1919).

The British film industry emerged weakened from the First World War. The British film industry hit rock bottom in “Black November” 1924 when not a single film was in production. In 1927, the British share of films released in British cinemas was only 4.85 per cent (44 films), while the USA continued to extend its post-war dominance of the British film market, with 723 films (81 per cent) entering the United States brought to British cinemas. Since those years, the British market has been the most important foreign market for the American film industry. In 1927 she recorded 30 percent of her foreign sales in Great Britain.

new beginning

The British government reacted to the crisis in the British film industry and enacted a film industry promotion act. The Cinematographic Films Act of 1927 banned exclusive contracts between British cinemas and American studios (the so-called “ block system ”) and introduced film quotas : These stipulated that initially 7.5 percent and later even 20 percent of the films shown had to have been produced in Great Britain . This led to American film studios producing or financing films in Great Britain (so-called quota quickies ) in order to be able to import more of their own films.

By 1928 the number of British film production companies had increased to 25, including eleven larger ones. The most important of these was British International Pictures (BIP), followed by the companies of the Gaumont association and some new companies, which made several films a year. Film production increased from 33 in 1926 to 80 in 1928. New film studios sprang up in Elstree , near London. In 1928, the British film theorist and producer L'Estrange Fawcett described "the rebirth of the English film" as "one of the most remarkable events on the world film market".

Young producers tried to stimulate the British film industry by cooperating with other countries. Michael Balcon and Herbert Wilcox , the two most important producers of the late 1920s and early 1930s, hired Hollywood stars for their films and sought partnerships with foreign film companies. Gainsborough Pictures , founded by Balcon in 1924 , entered into a collaboration with Germany's Ufa . So were the first directing works of Alfred Hitchcock , who was promoted by Balcon, the films Passion Maze and Der Bergadler from 1926 and 1927, German-British co-productions. Only then did Hitchcock shoot his first film in England, the thriller The Tenant , which brought him his artistic breakthrough.

Herbert Wilcox, on the other hand, found the support of American producers and founded the British National , which was absorbed into BIP in 1927. John Maxwell , the owner of BIP, tried from the start to get his film released in the US (as the company's name suggested) and offered Hitchcock a lucrative contract. His 1929 film Blackmail became BIP's first big hit. Other filmmakers went directly to the USA to get to know the working conditions there. Anthony Asquith spent six months in Hollywood before making his directorial debut with BIP in 1927 with Shooting Stars .

Early talkie era

The Development of British Talking Film

British film production and admissions
year movies Visitors
(in millions)
1925 33 k. A
1930 75 k. A
1935 165 912.3
1940 50 1027.0

In October 1927, the film The Jazz Singer had its premiere in the United States and brought about the breakthrough for talkies. In Great Britain, people hesitated to produce sound films, but in 1929 BIP was the first studio to release a film with sound sequences with Alfred Hitchcock's blackmail . Blackmail 's success also forced other studios to switch to talkies. British Lion produced the first continuous soundtrack film , The Clue of the New Pin , in 1929. Gainsborough didn't release their first " talkies " until 1930, which, however, were produced in America because of the delays in equipping the domestic studios. BIP took advantage of the head start as the first producer of talkies and became the UK's leading studio. They produced twice as many feature films as their closest competitor, British-Gaumont/Gainsborough.

The introduction of sound film suddenly made it more difficult to market British films in Europe. BIP in particular suffered as a result, having engaged international artists such as the German director EA Dupont or the Eastern European actresses Olga Chechowa and Anny Ondra in previous years . While silent films like Dupont's Piccadilly still found audiences abroad in 1929, this was no longer the case with sound films. BIP responded by producing multiple language versions for different markets. So Dupont shot the film Atlantic in 1929 in three different languages, each with a different cast. Only through the possibility of post-synchronization was this production method abolished.

In no other European country was the transition from silent to talkie as rapid as in Great Britain. While only 22 percent of British cinemas had a sound system in 1929, a year later it was 63 percent. The popularity of sound film also led to the opening of many new cinemas. In 1928 there were 3760 cinema screens, by 1930 there were 5361 cinema screens across Great Britain.

National genre cinema of the 1930s

The introduction of talkie stimulated British audiences' interest in domestic productions. Formal British English became the default language in the films, setting them apart from American films. In addition, it was possible for the first time to adequately implement the popular entertainment forms of the music halls on the big screen. Musicals established themselves as new genres , especially musical comedy, as well as farce as a form of comedy that combined situational comedy with linguistic, sometimes salacious humour.

For the musicals and musical comedies, artists were mainly recruited from the music halls. Gracie Fields , the biggest British musical star of the 1930s, already had more than ten years of stage experience when she made her film debut in 1931. All the major British studios tried to establish their own musical stars. Herbert Wilcox staged his future wife Anna Neagle in both musicals and dramatic roles. Director and producer Victor Saville made several films for Gaumont-British with Jessie Matthews , including a remake of the German film Viktor und Viktoria . Gaumont-British produced particularly extravagant musicals, such as the exotic musical fairy tale Chu-Chin-Chow with Anna May Wong , and even had Alfred Hitchcock make an operetta film with Viennese waltzes .

The British comedy film of the 1930s led a double life. While the musical comedies appealed to the upscale audience, the working class was entertained with more bawdy comedies. Many of these films were of low quality and belonged to the notorious "quota quickies". However, some film comedians appealed to all social classes, the most successful being Will Hay , who shaped the style of British comedy in the second half of the 1930s with films such as Oh, Mr. Porter .

In addition to comedy, crime films were the second preferred genre of "quota quickies", both genres together made up around two thirds of all British B movies in the 1930s. Unlike the American gangster films , the British detective films were very introspective, many of the whodunits played in the upper class of society.

Alfred Hitchcock made a completely different kind of crime film. Although the thrillers The Tenant and Blackmail were among his most outstanding films of the 1920s, Hitchcock mainly shot dramas and comedies until the mid-1930s. It wasn't until he left BIP and rejoined his mentor Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British that he became a thriller specialist. 1934 's The Man Who Knew Too Much was the first in a string of international successes that eventually landed Hitchcock a contract with American producer David O. Selznick . Hitchcock's most important British films were 1935 's The 39 Steps and 1938 's A Lady Disappears .

The only film genre to develop directly through American influence was that of horror films . Inspired by the Dracula and Frankenstein films, Gaumont-British produced two films starring Boris Karloff . 1933's The Ghoul , the first British film not to receive a youth rating from the censors, was a failure. The Man Who Swapped His Brain in 1936 was similarly unsuccessful, which is why horror films continued to be produced as low-budget films in the years that followed.

International successes

The revival of British cinema brought about turbulent changes in the film industry. Many small studios didn't have the money to produce big films, so they produced the "Quota Quickies" on behalf of American studios. From 1933, however, the Hollywood studios increasingly took on this task themselves through the founding of British subsidiaries. Although the Quota Quickies brought British film into disrepute, they were a springboard for a number of actors. Later Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn , Ida Lupino or Merle Oberon were discovered in these cheap productions, and the British film industry took notice of talents like James Mason or John Mills . Directors like Michael Powell also learned their craft from these films.

Charles Laughton, lead actor in The Private Life of Henry VIII.

The mid-1930s saw a shift in power among the major studios. BIP stopped film production and concentrated on distributing films. Instead, within a few months, Alexander Kordas London Film Productions had become Britain's leading studio. The Hungarian Korda founded London Films in 1932 with the aim of producing films for the international market. With his sixth film , The Private Life of Henry VIII succeeded in this. The film grossed over £500,000 worldwide in its first few months, was a box office hit in the US and earned lead actor Charles Laughton an Oscar .

Korda's success fundamentally changed production methods in Britain. Increasingly expensive films were produced with the prospect of high profits. This increased the dependency on success in the United States, since the domestic market was hardly sufficient to recoup the costs. This led to a serious crisis in the British film industry. In 1936, despite a string of box office hits, London Films had losses of over £330,000 and Gaumont-British even had debts of £1.1m. In early 1937 the studios borrowed over £4 million. In July 1937, the British banks finally announced that they would stop financing film projects. This financial collapse caused the film industry to “shrink to health”. Of the 640 production companies founded between 1925 and 1936, only 20 still existed in 1937.

Nevertheless, during the financially turbulent period, British film was at an artistic peak and finally internationally competitive. Never again were so many films produced as in the mid-1930s; In 1937 the number of releases reached a record 228 films. Alexander Korda continues the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII with very different films. These include the film biographies Catherine the Great with Elisabeth Bergner and Rembrandt with Charles Laughton, the fantasy comedy Ein Gespenst geht nach Amerika directed by René Clair , the science fiction film What Will Come or the spy film The Spy in Black , the first collaboration by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger .

Korda's most significant contribution to British film, however, were the so-called Empire Films such as Invasion of the Congo from 1935, The Four Feathers from 1939 and the 1937 Elephant Boy directed by Robert Flaherty : historicizing adventure films which demonstrated the power of the British colonial rulers in Africa and India . Gaumont-British responded and produced Rhodes of Africa and King Solomon's Mines in 1937 . All of these films were made with the support of the British government, reflecting the conservatism of British politics in the 1930s.

The large number of emigrants who flocked to Great Britain in the 1930s played a significant part in the success of British film . Almost every major studio employed German cameramen. In addition to Alexander Korda, the German Max Schach worked as a producer. Chess brought actors like Elisabeth Bergner, Fritz Kortner and the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber to England. Other exiles included Austrian actor Adolf Wohlbrück , who made a career for himself as Anton Walbrook in England, Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, and actors Lilli Palmer , Peter Lorre , and Conrad Veidt , who later went to Hollywood. The German Alfred Junge had been active in England since the late 1920s as one of the most influential art directors in Europe.

The British government had also recognized the importance of the domestic film industry at the end of the 1930s. It responded to the financial turmoil of 1937 with the Cinematographic Film Act of 1938, which replaced the old law after eleven years. Admittedly, quotas were once again set in the new law and it was also stipulated that a certain minimum budget was not to be undershot. However, the law was relaxed to the extent that American actors and technicians could be used for these productions. This enabled British producers to work more closely with American studios. Alexander Korda, for example, produced films such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips together with MGM , for which Robert Donat was awarded an Oscar.

John Grierson and the Documentary Movement

While in the early 1930s the general public sought and found simple entertainment in the cinemas, a cinematic movement developed in Great Britain at the same time, which felt connected to realism and tried to capture the real world with cinematic means. This movement was founded by John Grierson , who, as a critical observer of British and American society, had developed the theory that film had the task of mediating between the state and the population and of uncovering problems.

In 1927 Grierson took up a position with the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a government agency responsible for promoting relations between Britain and its colonies. His task was to produce advertising films for the EMB. In addition, Grierson was working on a documentary about Scottish fishermen. Released in 1929, Drifters is credited with marking the beginning of the British documentary movement. While Drifters still worked with modern montage techniques, Grierson later propagated a journalistic style. For this he recruited talents like Basil Wright , Harry Watt and Paul Rotha . Robert Flaherty came to the EMB at Grierson's invitation in 1931 and shot the short film Industrial Britain there , which served as a model for other documentaries about the British world of work. Three years later, Flaherty produced the documentary Man of Aran for Michael Balcon , about the residents of the Aran Islands battling the harsh forces of nature.

In 1933 Griersons moved to the GPO Film Unit , the film department of the General Post Office reporting to the British government . One of the first films released by the GPO was Basil Wright's The Song of Ceylon , a film about the consequences of colonial influence for the people of Ceylon . This film was financed by the tea industry. Other branches of industry also used the possibilities of documentary film as an image carrier and advertising platform. In 1934, for example, the Shell oil company founded a film department for which experimental filmmaker Len Lye shot the animated film The Birth of the Robot in 1935 . Lye had previously produced the abstract animated film A Color Box for the GPO .

The GPO Film Unit came into contact with other artists such as the writers H.G. Wells and Graham Greene or the composer Benjamin Britten . Among other things, Britten composed the music for the short film Night Mail from 1936, probably the most important British documentary film of the 1930s. It is considered a documentary synthesis of the arts of image, editing, sound, music and poetry. The poet W. H. Auden wrote the lyrics for this film about the mail train from London to Scotland .

While many film historians consider documentary to be Britain's most significant contribution to cinematic history, the role of the documentary movement has been disputed for many years. Many saw the heroization of the ordinary worker in the films of the GPO as an expression of a basic left-wing political attitude. But Grierson never used his films as a means of political expression; in fact they tended to divert attention from the social problems in Britain and thus served the interests of the Conservative government. So it was a logical consequence that during the Second World War the film department of the GPO was subordinated to the Ministry of Information .

British cinema during the Second World War

The start of the Second World War brought lasting changes to the British film industry. In the first week of the war, all cinemas were closed for fear of attack, but gradually the cinemas reopened. Recognizing the importance of going to the cinema on the mood of the population, the government determined which topics the film studios should cover and which could not be mentioned for reasons of safety. These rules restricted the work of the studios. In addition, the government requisitioned production facilities and conscripted more than two-thirds of all film technicians into military service. This meant that in the early 1940s only nine film studios were still active and the number of films produced fell from 103 in 1939 to just 46 films in 1942. At the same time, cinema, and especially British films, gained in popularity, and audience numbers rose continuously during the war years.

The first British propaganda film made under the new government guidelines was Alexander Korda's The Lion Has Wings , which was made in a matter of weeks. Korda interrupted work on his most elaborate film to date, the fantasy spectacle The Thief of Baghdad , which could not be completed until 1940 after Korda had settled in the United States. Like many other English-born artists, Korda was severely criticized for remaining in the United States during the first months of the war; London assured the British that they could best serve their country from Hollywood. At the end of 1939, Alfred Hitchcock shot the spy film Der Auslandskorrespondent , which anticipated the German air raids on London in the final scene, and later worked on two short films for the French resistance on behalf of the British government. Korda and Victor Saville produced films like That Hamilton Woman or The Mortal Storm in Hollywood , which brought them problems with the US government, which was striving for neutrality. It was only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Hollywood also officially got involved in wartime propaganda, producing films such as the multiple Oscar-winning drama Mrs. Miniver .

The Odeon cinema in London's Leicester Square has been the premiere cinema since 1937

Entrepreneur J. Arthur Rank , in particular, benefited from the studio closures and Korda's stay in Hollywood. Within a few years, he built up an empire with the Rank Organization that, towards the end of the Second World War, was larger than any of the established Hollywood studios. In 1938 he bought the Denham Studios from Korda, followed in 1939 by the Elstree Studios and in 1941, after the death of Oscar Deutsch , the third largest cinema chain in Great Britain, the Odeon cinemas, as well as the Gaumont-British and Gainsborough production companies. But Rank also promoted a number of young filmmakers in the 1940s, whom he supported under the umbrella of Independent Producers Ltd. enabled independent work.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were the first to enjoy Rank's support. From 1942 they operated under the name The Archers and over the next 15 years were jointly responsible for the script, direction and production of their films. The Archers' first film was the war film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing , but it was Colonel Blimp 's 1943 film The Life and Death that cemented the Archers' reputation. Originally planned as another propaganda film, the film became a tongue-in-cheek celebration of virtues such as honor, depicting the friendship between an English and German officer that has lasted through three wars. While Blimp reflected Pressburger's situation as an émigré, A Canterbury Tale , which blends the reality of war with the mysticism of Canterbury Cathedral , is among Powell's most personal films.

Other films dealt with the fate of soldiers at the front and those left behind on the home front . Michael Balcon, who took over Ealing Studios in 1938 and thereby became the most important film producer independent of Rank during the war years, played a pioneering role. He recognized the need for realistic depictions of everyday wartime early on and hired the documentary filmmakers Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti from the GPO Film Unit . Ealing's war films portrayed the social transformation of the early 1940s, with members of the middle and lower classes assuming responsibilities in both military and civilian life. Films such as Harry Watt 's Nine Men or Charles Frend's San Demetrio London (both released in 1943) showed ordinary soldiers in action, while Alberto Cavalcanti's Went the Day Well? from 1942 described the fear of infiltration of a small village by German spies.

Other film studios followed Ealing's production style. Thus, in 1943, Gainsborough Pictures released the film Millions Like Us , which dealt with women's new role as workers in Britain. The preeminent war drama of the period was In Which We Serve , the joint directorial debut of playwright Noël Coward and former film editor David Lean . After this success (Coward received an honorary Oscar in 1943), Lean filmed other screenplays by Coward, most recently in 1945 the soulful drama Encounter . To realize these projects, he founded the production company Cineguild with the support of J. Arthur Rank , in which also the screenwriter and later director Ronald Neame and the producer Anthony Havelock-Allan were involved.

In British war films, a hitherto unknown convergence of documentary and feature film took place. Many feature films used newsreel footage for war footage, while documentaries often re-enacted scenes. Humphrey Jennings directed the 1943 government-commissioned documentary feature film Fires Were Started , which used stylized images to show the work of firefighters. Previously, Jennings created the short films The Heart of Britain and Listen To Britain in 1941 . A cinematic experiment was Jennings' film The Silent Village , in which he reenacted the destruction of Lidice using a Welsh village as an example. Other documentaries showed audiences the British successes at the front, as in Roy Boulting's 1943 film Desert Victory about Montgomery 's victory against Rommel at El Alamein .

Towards the end of the war, films aimed at promoting patriotism increased, such as Laurence Olivier's directorial debut Henry V , which was the most expensive British film to date. Other films such as Anthony Asquith's The Road to the Stars or Powell & Pressburger's film Error in the Hereafter , which was only released after the end of the war, emphasized the British-American friendship.

post war period

British Film after the Second World War

British film production and admissions
year movies Visitors
(in millions)
1945 39 1585.0
1950 125 1395.8
1955 110 1181.8
1960 122 500.8
1965 93 326.6

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, British cinema continued its triumphal march. The political spirit of optimism following the surprising victory of Labor politician Clement Attlee in the British general election also promised a positive development in the domestic film industry. British themes and British films remained in demand, so that in 1946, more than 1.6 billion cinema tickets were sold, a record that has not been matched to this day. J. Arthur Rank was the first British entrepreneur who could compete with the film moguls in Hollywood. In August 1945 , the magazine Kinematograph Weekly Rank described him as the central figure in the film business on both sides of the Atlantic.

In terms of content, the film studios continued to focus on traditional British themes even after the end of the war. After Olivier's Heinrich V. , other literary adaptations were made at great expense. Rank produced Gabriel Pascal's epic film Caesar and Cleopatra , an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw 's play of the same name. David Lean filmed two of Charles Dickens' classics , The Inheritance and Oliver Twist . Olivier himself surpassed the success of Henry V with the 1948 Shakespearean adaptation Hamlet , which became the first British film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Gainsborough Pictures focused on more trivial literature with its melodramas . Beginning with Leslie Arliss ' The Gentleman in Gray (1943) and Anthony Asquith's Gaslight and Shadow (1944), Gainsborough produced a series of period dramas that placed female characters at the center of the plot. Under the direction of studio boss Maurice Ostrer, the Gainsborough melodramas became a trademark. The Heartless Woman , starring Margaret Lockwood and James Mason, became the biggest box-office hit of 1946 and, with over 18 million viewers, is one of the UK's most-watched films of all time. In addition to Lockwood and Mason, the Gainsborough melodramas spawned Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger as new movie stars.

While Gainsborough's costume films were aimed more at a female audience, a series of crime films that appealed to male cinema audiences was created under the impression of the World War. "Spivs" , the crooks on the black markets , were the protagonists of dark films like Alberto Cavalcanti 's They Made Me a Fugitive or John Boulting 's adaptation of Graham Greene's thriller Brighton Rock (both 1947). Carol Reed made her own mark on British gangster films with the thrillers Outcast and Little Heart in Distress , another Graham Greene film adaptation . Returning from Hollywood, Alexander Korda inspired Greene and Reed to develop a thriller set in post-war Europe. The result was the thriller The Third Man , released in 1949 , which was named Best British Film of the 20th Century by the British Film Institute in 1999. The film, starring American actors Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten , was an international success, and cinematographer Robert Krasker received an Oscar for his work.

Krasker's Expressionist cinematography in Outcast and The Third Man was representative of the development of highly stylized films in post-war British cinema. As early as 1945, Ealing created Dream Without End , a horror film that cleverly combined realism, black romanticism and expressionism. In addition to the nightmarish crime films, the color films by Powell and Pressburger were also characterized by expressionism. The 1948 Oscar-winning production design of the Himalayan melodrama The Black Narcissus , which won an Oscar, and the ballet scenes in The Red Shoes were highly stylized .

The artistic successes of British film were overshadowed by a new financial crisis. When the Attlee government ran into financial difficulties in 1947, Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton surprisingly imposed an ad valorem tax on imported films on August 7, 1947. The Hollywood studios had to transfer 75 percent of the expected revenue to the British state in advance. The tax triggered heated debates in the British public, which was led under the catchphrase "Bogart or bacon" . The Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEA) immediately imposed an embargo on American films in the UK. The British government responded with a funding program for the production of new films intended to fill the gap. But when, after six months, the tax was withdrawn and the MPEA lifted its embargo, the UK cinema market was flooded with the withheld US productions, leaving no demand for the hastily produced domestic films.

This situation had a dramatic impact on the British film industry. The British film market faltered, and in February 1949 only seven of the 26 studios were working. Alexander Korda's British Lion was only able to survive with the financial help of the National Film Finance Corporation , founded in 1949 . J. Arthur Rank not only suffered from losses in the domestic film market, but also lost his business partners in the United States. At the end of 1949 the Rank organization had lost £16 million. Rank closed some of its studios, including Gainsborough Pictures , and carried out drastic rationalization measures, which, however, could not prevent the further decline of the Rank empire in the 1950s.

Entertainment cinema 1950s

This Avro Lancaster was used in the film May 1943 - The Destruction of the Dams

The 1950s are commonly referred to as the 'doldrums era' of British cinema. The growing popularity of television has contributed to a steady decline in cinema attendance; in 1951 there were still 1365 million visits, in 1960 there were only 500 million. During the same period, the number of cinemas in the UK fell from 4581 to 3034.

Many film historians see an artistic regression connected with the economic decline. The economic problems of Rank and Korda at the end of the 1940s meant that prestige projects were no longer realized. Directors like Carol Reed or Michael Powell only had respectable successes. Only David Lean continued his world career. With the war film The Bridge on the River Kwai , he achieved the greatest international success of a British film in the 1950s.

Period films emerged mainly in the early 1950s as American productions in British studios, such as Disney's Treasure Island , MGM's Ivanhoe - The Black Knight and Warner's The King's Admiral . Challenging literary adaptations such as Anthony Asquith's 1951 The Browning Version and Laurence Olivier's Richard III. from 1955 remained the exception in a time that was increasingly characterized by genre films and film series. However, the domestic audience accepted these films, so in 1959 the twelve most-watched films were all British productions.

War films proved to be the most popular genre of the 1950s. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, few films like Basil Dearden 's 1946 POW drama Silent Heroes or Powell and Pressburger's 1949 Backroom Experts dared to look back. It was not until 1953 that World War II films began to gain wider attention when The Great Atlantic , an Ealing Studios production , and The Red Beret , the first production of future James Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli , became the hit films of the year. While the Great Atlantic still offered a realistic view of what was happening in the war, a more conservative worldview emerged in the years that followed. Actors such as Jack Hawkins , Richard Todd and Kenneth More shaped the conservative male image of the 1950s with their portrayal of idealized heroes. True events were preferably filmed, such as Operation Chastise in the 1955 film May 1943 - The Destruction of the Dams . May 1943 - The Destruction of the Dams was the UK's most-watched film of the year, along with the 1956 film Against All Powers about war hero Douglas Bader . Some film historians, such as James Chapman, see these glorifying war films as an analogy to American westerns . It was not until the late 1950s that more critical films about the World War began to appeal to the public. The Bridge on the River Kwai and Leslie Norman's Dunkirk were the hit films of 1958 and provided a glimpse into the dark side of war.

comedies
Ealing Studios logo

Outside the UK, 1950s British cinema is primarily associated with comedy films. The Ealing Comedies, released between 1947 and 1957, became a hallmark of British humour , although only 17 of Ealing Studios ' 58 post-war productions were comedies. The first modern Ealing comedy is The Little Detectives , released in 1947 as the studio's first comedy since the end of World War II. Three films followed in 1949 that definitively defined the style of Ealing comedy. Blockade in London satirized the situation in post-war London and featured comedy actors such as Stanley Holloway , Basil Radford and Margaret Rutherford . Set during World War II, Alexander Mackendrick 's Rejoice in Life was based on a real event off the Hebridean island of Eriskay . Both films extolled the team spirit of the common man against authority, a formula that screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke in particular had perfected. Ealing's third hit, in 1949, was Robert Hamer's black comedy Nobles, which starred Alec Guinness in eight roles. Guinness also acted in the Ealing comedies Overnight , The Man in the White Suit (both 1951) and Ladykillers in 1955. All three films received Academy Award nominations for Best Screenplay.

When Michael Balcon sold Ealing Studios to the BBC in 1955, other studios had already adopted Ealing's style and released their own films, such as the Rank Organization 's 1953 comedy The Fiery Isabella . Ladykillers was Ealing's last major comedy hit, although three more films followed. However, the literary comedies were no longer in demand with the cinema audience. Comedians like Norman Wisdom revived the crude slapstick films of Will Hay and George Formby . The era of comedy series began, which began in 1954 with Aber, Herr Doktor… . Directed by Ralph Thomas for Rank, the film made lead actor Dirk Bogarde a star and found a total of six sequels, which were produced until 1970. However, Bogarde only took part in the first three Doctor films . Also in 1954, another comedy series was started with The Beauties of St. Trinians , which made it to 1966 on four entries. The films were based on the Ronald Searle cartoons and were produced by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat , who had been developing comedy material since the 1930s.

The Carry-on... films , directed by Ralph Thomas' brother Gerald , proved to be the longest-lasting series. The first film in the series, cheer up, chest out! , was created in 1958 and was planned as a single film. However, the unexpected box office success led to two sequels the next year. A total of 30 films and several television productions were made by 1992. Public institutions such as schools, hospitals and the police were initially targeted, but in the 1960s the series shifted to satirizing a wide variety of film genres. The series reached its climax in 1964 with It's Crazy - Caesar Loves Cleopatra . Comedians like Sidney James , Kenneth Williams , Charles Hawtrey , Kenneth Connor , Joan Sims , Barbara Windsor or Hattie Jacques were among the regular cast of the carry-on... films.

The comedies by brothers John and Roy Boulting had a strong satirical tone . After films as diverse as the thrillers Brighton Rock (1947) and The City Holds Its Breath (1950) or the biopic The Miraculous Camera (1951), the Boulting brothers focused on comedy in the mid-1950s. Her first major comedy success was the 1956 military satire Best Man in the Army , starring Ian Carmichael , Terry-Thomas and Richard Attenborough , who also starred in the Boultings' subsequent films. In 1959 the Boulting brothers signed Peter Sellers . Sellers had started his radio career with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe on The Goon Show and had appeared in several films before his international breakthrough came with the Boulting comedy Young Man of Good Family .

horror movies

Just as Ealing became synonymous with comedy, the Hammer films became synonymous with British horror films. Hammer Film Productions was founded in 1935 as a film distributor and in 1947 moved into its own production facility at Bray Studios . After attempts in various film genres, Hammer succeeded in 1955 with the science fiction film Shock , which was repeated a year later with XX unknown . In 1957, Hammer ventured into classic horror material with Frankenstein's Curse . With a production cost of £65,000, the film grossed £300,000 in the UK and around £1m in the US.

Hammer then acquired the rights to their 1930s horror films from Universal and began producing his own remakes. In 1958 Hammer's version of Dracula was published, in the years that followed The Mummy ( Revenge of the Pharaohs , 1959), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( Blow 12 in London , 1960) and the Werewolf ( The Curse of Siniestro , 1961) revived. The Frankenstein and Dracula films in particular proved to be extremely lucrative and were developed into film series. The Hammer films' standout stars included Christopher Lee , who embodied a new type of villain as Count Dracula, and Peter Cushing , who played Baron Victor Frankenstein and appeared as Dracula's antagonist. The style, which was panned by contemporary critics as "disgusting" and "sadistic", was shaped by Terence Fisher 's directing and the expressive color photography. Hammer's Victorian -influenced horror films continued to attract audiences into the 1970s, but continued to be critically ignored.

Hammer's successes also prompted other producers to offer cheaply shot horror films. Anglo-Amalgamated published Corridors of Blood in 1958, starring Boris Karloff as the sadistic surgeon. Three films followed in 1959 and 1960, critically branded as the "Sadian Trilogy," paving the way for exploitation films . While The Black Museum and The Red Shadow are now considered typical genre products, the horror thriller Eyes of Fear has been hailed as Michael Powell's last masterpiece since its rediscovery in the 1970s. For Powell, however, the public slating of film criticism meant the end of his career as a film director.

Other horror films, more committed to black romance, were received more favorably by the critics. Described by film historian William K. Everson as "the last true horror classic," Jacques Tourneur 's 1957 The Curse of the Demon kicked off a series of atmospheric horror films made in the early 1960s by filmmakers such as Jack Clayton ( Schloss of Terror , 1961) or Robert Wise ( Until the Blood Freezes , 1963). Finally, in 1964, Roger Corman shot two of his Edgar Allan Poe- inspired films in England.

In the mid-1960s, two other film companies specializing in horror films, Amicus Productions and Tigon , established themselves in the United Kingdom. While Amicus was primarily involved with anthology films such as Die Toten Karten des Dr. Schreck (1965) noticed, Tigon relied on cheaply produced shockers. However, with Michael Reeves ' The Witch Hunter (1968), Tigon released one of the most influential British horror films of the late 1960s.

From Free Cinema to New Wave

Free Cinema
The National Film Theatre, home of free cinema screenings

The development of British film in the early post-war period was critically observed by a group of young filmmakers. Sequence magazine, founded in Oxford in 1947 by Lindsay Anderson , Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz , developed as their mouthpiece . They later shifted their publishing activities to the magazine Sight & Sound , in which Anderson in particular provoked with polemical articles. While Anderson had initially distanced himself from John Grierson's ideological claims to documentary film, in 1956 in the widely acclaimed essay Stand Up! stand up a socially committed cinema.

Anderson and his companions implemented their idea of ​​film in their own independent productions, which they presented in February 1956 under the title Free Cinema at London's National Film Theater . In addition to Lindsay Anderson 's short film O Dreamland , which was completed in 1953 , Lorenza Mazzetti 's film Together and Momma Don't Allow , a joint work by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson , were shown. A common feature of the films was a documentary approach that allowed an unembellished view of the living conditions of the working class.

Up to 1959, a total of six programs were shown under the title Free Cinema , in which early works of the French Nouvelle Vague and the young Polish cinema were shown in addition to British films . Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz again contributed their own films to the last Free Cinema program, but then devoted themselves to the production of feature films. Anderson later denied that free cinema was an actual film movement, but the film program influenced other independent documentarians such as John Schlesinger . At the same time, direct cinema emerged in North America and cinéma vérité in France as comparable documentary film movements.

British New Wave
Karel Reisz (centre) with Frank Beyer and Antonín Martin Brousil

Parallel to free cinema , a new generation of socially critical writers and theater makers established themselves in the United Kingdom, who addressed social alienation and class conflicts in their works. Tony Richardson 's 1956 staging of John Osborne 's debut Angry Young Men was the first successful stage production by this group of writers, henceforth known as Angry Young Men . In 1959, a work by Angries was filmed for the first time in Jack Clayton's The Way Up , an adaptation of John Braine 's novel of the same name. The Way to the Top became a huge success with audiences and critics alike, winning two Academy Awards. The film is considered the beginning of the British New Wave .

While Clayton kept his distance from the British New Wave in the following years , Tony Richardson and John Osborne founded the company Woodfall Production together with the American producer Harry Saltzman to promote further film projects. 1959 saw the release of the film version of Anger , starring Richard Burton , and a year later Richardson and Osborne won Laurence Olivier for the title role in The Comedian . Karel Reisz directed an adaptation of Alan Sillitoe 's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning for Woodfall in 1960 .

Reisz's Saturday Night through Sunday Morning was the first New Wave film to focus not on conflict between social classes but on those within the lower class. Similar to Free Cinema , Reisz tried to create a documentary style that emphasized “ Kitchen Sink Realism ” ; the Oxford graduate kept his distance from his characters. Saturday Night to Sunday Morning won the British Film Academy Award for Best Picture and gave producer Richardson the financial means to direct the ambitious drama Bitter Honey , based on the Shelagh Delaney drama of the same name .

Independent of Woodfall, John Schlesinger made his own kitchen sink drama in 1962 with Just a Touch of Happiness , which was followed by the 1963 comedy Beloved Weird . Alongside Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, Schlesinger is one of the outstanding directors of the New Wave . Anderson, the leader of the free cinema movement, didn't make his feature film debut until 1963 with Alluring Laurel .

After the commercial failure of the 1962 film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , another adaptation of a novel by Alan Sillitoe, Tony Richardson turned away from the socially critical contemporary dramas and directed an adaptation of Henry Fielding 's classic novel Tom Jones from a screenplay by John Osborne . The costume film Tom Jones - Between Bed and the Gallows proved to be a spectacular hit with audiences and was awarded the Oscar for best film in 1964. At the same time, the interests of British cinema audiences shifted from the gray north of England to the colorful Swinging London .

The British New Wave of 1959-1963 ultimately proved to be a short-lived movement, but one that had a major impact on the British film landscape. She spotlighted a new generation of actors, with Albert Finney , Richard Harris , Rita Tushingham , Tom Courtenay , Julie Christie and Alan Bates launching international careers.

Swinging Sixties

Economic boom
Self-portrait of Stanley Kubrick from the late 1940s

The United Kingdom experienced a film industry boom in the 1960s, albeit largely thanks to the involvement of American film studios. The success of the British New Wave , the attractiveness of the capital London as a fashionable and cultural center, financially favorable working conditions and liberal film funding made more and more Hollywood studios appear as investors in the United Kingdom. This meant that one could speak of an Anglo-American rather than a British film industry. In 1967, 90% of all investment in British film production was made by American companies.

As early as the late 1950s, American producers were increasingly involved in British films when the Eady Levy , an initially voluntary levy on cinema operators to promote the British film industry, became mandatory. British productions were supported with this levy in the sense of reference film funding. American studios tried to win over the audience and thus also funding with popular themes. Thus, in 1961, MGM's UK subsidiary produced a successful crime novel adaptation of Agatha Christie at 4:50pm from Paddington , which found three sequels starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple .

British film funding enabled the production of epic films such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz 's Cleopatra (1963), the most expensive film of all time up to that point, or David Lean's epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Lawrence of Arabia won seven Oscars from ten nominations, with leading actor Peter O'Toole losing to Gregory Peck , and ushered in a string of British Oscar triumphs. Tony Richardson 's Tom Jones , Fred Zinnemann 's period film A Man for Every Season (1966) and Carol Reed's musical adaptation Oliver (1968), like Lawrence of Arabia , won the Academy Award for Best Picture; overall, 31% of all Oscar nominations in the 1960s went to British or Anglo-American productions. Numerous British actors have received Oscar nominations, confirming the good reputation of British acting.

The boom in the British film industry attracted not only American financiers, but also foreign directors. While directors such as Fred Zinnemann or Sidney Lumet ( A Bunch of Great Dogs , 1965; Call for a Dead Man , 1966) came to England for individual projects, Stanley Kubrick left Hollywood for good after his disappointing experiences with Spartacus in the early 1960s and settled near Elstree low. Kubrick's first British work was the film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel Lolita . Similar to the following works, the satire Dr. Strange, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb (1964) and the sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Lolita was filmed but not set in England . It was not until the 1970s that Kubrick made two films set in his adopted homeland, the dystopia A Clockwork Orange and the period film Barry Lyndon .

Richard Lester , who was born in Philadelphia but moved to London in 1953 at the age of 21, was more closely associated with England . His film directing career began in 1960 with the short film The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film , a collaboration with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. Lester's breakthrough came in the mid-1960s with the first two Beatles films and the comedy The Surprise , which shaped the image of "Swinging London". Also during the 1950s, Joseph Losey came to London, where he found asylum after being ' blacklisted ' during the McCarthy era . Losey made several sophisticated literary adaptations, most notably his collaboration with screenwriter Harold Pinter on the films The Servant (1963), Accident - Oxford Incident (1967) and The Middleman (1970).

A number of European directors also worked in London in the mid-1960s. In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni 's Blow Up showed a realistic and complex portrait of the London youth scene, which David Hemmings captured with his camera as a fashion photographer. The picture that Polish director Roman Polański painted of England in the Swinging Sixties with his horror thriller Ekel (1965) and the macabre comedy Wenn Katelbach geht... (1966) was much darker. Disgust was Polański's first English-language film, which went to Hollywood for his next projects after the American-funded comedy Dance of the Vampires (1967). While Antonioni and Polański deliberately chose the United Kingdom as the setting for their films, the French director François Truffaut shot the science fiction film Fahrenheit 451 at the British Pinewood Studios in 1966 solely for financial reasons, since he had no financial backers for his film adaptation in France from Ray Bradbury 's novel of the same name. Fahrenheit 451 remained Truffaut's only English language film.

agent films

The most successful British film series of the 1960s was also created with financiers from the United States. The American producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli acquired the rights to film Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in 1960 and founded the British company Eon Productions for this purpose . 1962 was created as a co-production with United Artists James Bond - 007 chases Dr. No , which proved so profitable that a second film, From Russia With Love , was produced just a year later. 1964 saw the release of Goldfinger , the most successful James Bond film to date. Despite a significantly increased budget, Goldfinger recouped its costs within just two weeks.

The extravagant setting and the action in Goldfinger , which deviated from the previous conventions of spy films , proved to be style-defining and triggered a worldwide "Bond fever". James Bond, played by Sean Connery , became an icon of the 1960s and one of the most successful franchises in film history. Connery played Agent 007 in two other films, Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), before being replaced by Australian George Lazenby after a dispute with the producers . In Her Majesty's Secret Service , 1969 could not build on the previous successes, so that Lazenby did not get a second chance as Bond. Sean Connery returned for the 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever before Roger Moore took over the role for the next twelve years.

The success of the Bond films triggered a wave of agent and spy films. James Bond 007 found numerous imitators in European cinema ( OSS 117 in France, Jerry Cotton in Germany) and in Hollywood, where James Coburn played secret agents as Derek Flint and Dean Martin as Matt Helm . The spy comedy Daggers in the Kasbah (1965) starring David Niven , who also appeared as one of numerous "James Bonds" in the pastiche Casino Royale (1967), was a British parody. Ralph Thomas resurrected the character of private investigator Bulldog Drummond in the James Bond spoofs Hot Cats (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969).

Spy films such as Michael Anderson 's The Quiller Memorandum (1966) or the thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) , based on a novel by John le Carré , provided a realistic picture of agent activities during the Cold War . In 1965, Len Deighton 's novel Ipcress was filmed - top secret , which offered a counterpoint to James Bond with the bespectacled Harry Palmer . Palmer was portrayed by Michael Caine , who previously had his first major role in the historical war film Zulu . With this role, Caine rose to become one of the best-known British actors of the late 1960s, also convincing in comedies such as The Seducer Sends His Greetings (1966) and Charlie Sweeps Off Millions (1969). He played Harry Palmer in the sequels Finale in Berlin and The Billion Dollar Brain in 1966 and 1967, as well as in two lesser-acclaimed films in the mid-1990s.

View of London

At the same time that James Bond was becoming a worldwide phenomenon, United Artists was producing the Beatles ' film debut in 1964 with Richard Lester 's A Hard Day's Night . A Hard Day's Night marked the climax of " Beatlemania "; for the first time in history a film was distributed worldwide with more than 1500 copies.

Music films were by then already an established genre in British film; since the late 1950s, stars such as Tommy Steele and Adam Faith have had regular screen appearances. In the early 1960s, Cliff Richard was able to break into the music charts with the comedies Hello, Mr. Twen! (1961) and You and Me Holiday (1963) at the box office. However, A Hard Day's Night differed in style and content from this pop musical and was celebrated by contemporary critics precisely for this reason. For financial and time reasons, Lester shot A Hard Day's Night as a mockumentary in the cinéma vérité style and anticipated the development of the modern music video in the presentation of the individual pieces of music.

A Hard Day's Night was followed by the 1965 Beatles film Hi-Hi-Hilfe! , also directed by Richard Lester. That same year, John Boorman released his directorial debut , Catch Us If You Can! , in which he staged the Dave Clark Five . This flick failed to match the success of Lester's films, but proved to be equally innovative. Both Catch us if you can! and A Hard Day's Night are now regarded as documents of "Swinging London" and the youth culture expressed in it . Later musical films with groups such as Herman's Hermits , on the other hand, followed more of the Cliff Richard comedy scheme.

If the music films offered a carefree look at London, other films about the attitude towards life in the 1960s had serious undertones. Films like Richard Lester's comedy The Certain Trick (1965), Silvio Narizzano 's Georgy Girl (1966) or Albert Finney's directorial debut A Successful Dud (1967) showed their heroes trying to find their way in the new age. The films sometimes looked like a continuation of the British New Wave , especially since the stars of the kitchen sink dramas also acted in these comedies. Julie Christie's Oscar-winning role in Darling (1965) was reminiscent of her character in John Schlesinger's previous directorial work Beloved Weird , but represented the changing image of women in the 1960s. The male counterpart of Christie's Diana, a " working-class Don Juan ," was Michael Caine's Alfie in The Seducer's Greetings (1965). Both films documented the relaxed approach to sexuality in the UK after the Profumo affair .

At the end of the 1960s, London's luster faded and an influential counterculture developed with the hippie movement . Under the influence of the 1968 movement , socially critical films were made again. While Tony Richardson's historical anti-war film Attack of the Light Brigade contained a veiled criticism of the Vietnam War , the revolutionary spirit of the '68ers was expressed violently in Lindsay Anderson's If .... Anderson's satire kicked off a trilogy about Mick Travis , played by Malcolm McDowell , whose story was continued in The Successful One (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). The film Performance by Nicolas Roeg , also produced in 1968 but not released until 1970 , in which Mick Jagger played a seedy pop star, finally formed a counter-image to A Hard Day's Night with its cynical and pessimistic undertone .

Previously, after the end of the New Wave , socially critical topics were reserved for television. Peter Watkins ' docu -fiction The War Game was originally produced for the BBC series The Wednesday Play in 1965 , but the BBC felt it was too violent and the film was only shown in cinemas. The War Game won an Academy Award and proved to be one of the most influential British documentaries of the post-war period. The docu-drama Cathy Come Home was also created in 1966 as part of the series The Wednesday Play , which became one of the most discussed films in British television history and enabled director Ken Loach to realize his own cinema projects. Loach's second feature film, the social drama Kes , set in the mining town of Barnsley , became a classic of British youth cinema .

See also

literature

  • Jörg Helbig: History of British Film . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-476-01510-6 .
  • Robert Murphy: The British Cinema Book . British Film Institute, London 2001, ISBN 0-85170-852-8 (English).
  • Brian McFarlane: The Encyclopedia of British Film . Methuen, London 2003, ISBN 0-413-77301-9 (English).
  • Geoffrey-Nowell-Smith: History of International Film . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-476-02164-5 .
  • Sarah Street: British National Cinema . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-06735-9 .

web links

Commons : British film  - collection of images, videos and audio files

itemizations

  1. ↑ David Robinson: From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film . Columbia University Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0-231-10338-7 , pp. 60–62.
  2. ↑ Roberta Pearson: Early Cinema . In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: The Oxford History of World Cinema , p. 16.
  3. ↑ Michael Brooke: Daring Daylight Burglary, A (1903) on BFI Screenonline (accessed 3 May 2010).
  4. ↑ a b Charles Barr: Before Blackmail : Silent British Cinema . In: Robert Murphy: The British Cinema Book , p. 14.
  5. ↑ quoted from Projection Lantern and Cinematograph , July 1906
  6. ^ a b Rachael Low: The History of the British Film 1918-1929 , George Allen & Unwin, London 1971.
  7. ^ a b L'Estrange Fawcett: The World of Film. Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich / Leipzig / Vienna 1928, p. 137 (translated by C. Zell, supplemented by S. Walter Fischer)
  8. ↑ Ruth Vasey: The Worldwide Diffusion of Cinema. In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.): History of international film. , pp. 53–55
  9. ^ Information based on BFI Film & Television Handbook ; see UK Feature Films Produced 1912-2003. BFI Screenonline; accessed May 3, 2010.
  10. ↑ a b UK Feature Films Produced 1912–2003 and UK Cinema Admissions 1933–2003 according to the bfi Film & Television Handbook , BFI Screenonline; accessed April 9, 2011.
  11. ↑ Douglas Gomery: Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe convert to sound . In: Yale French Studies No. 60, 1980.
  12. ↑ Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 , Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1984.
  13. ↑ Denis Gifford: The British Film Catalog 1897-1970 , David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1973.
  14. ↑ Michael Balcon: A Lifetime of Films , Hutchinson, London 1969.
  15. ↑ Geoffrey Macnab: J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. Routledge, London 1993, ISBN 0-415-07272-7 , pp, 53.
  16. ↑ Financial Times , July 13, 1937.
  17. ↑ Cinematograph Weekly , January 13, 1938.
  18. ↑ Lawrence Napper: A Despicable Tradition? Quota quickies in the 1930s . In: The British Cinema Book . British Film Institute, London 2001.
  19. ↑ a b c Ian Aitken: Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement , Routledge, London 1990.
  20. ↑ H. Forsyth Hardy: Grierson on Documentary . Collins,London 1946.
  21. ↑ Anthony Aldgate, Jeffrey Richards: Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1994.
  22. ↑ Antonia Lant: Britain at the End of Empire . In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: The Oxford History of World Cinema , p. 365
  23. ↑ Michael Balcon: Realism or Tinsel? Workers Film Association, Brighton 1943.
  24. ↑ Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945-1951. British Broadcasting Corporation, London 1985, ISBN 0-224-02325-X , pp. 129-130.
  25. ↑ quoted in Geoffrey Macnab: J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry . Routledge, London 1993, ISBN 0-415-07272-7 , p. 32.
  26. ↑ Jörg Helbig: History of British Film . p. 82.
  27. ↑ The Ultimate Film Chart ( Memento des Originals from February 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@2Template: Web archive/IABot/www.lff.org.ukBritish Film Institute, accessed 27 May 2010.
  28. ↑ The BFI 100. ( Memento des Originals from June 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@2Template:Webarchiv/IABot/www.bfi.org.ukBritish Film Institute, accessed April 10, 2010.
  29. ↑ Peter Wollen: Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film . Verso, London 2002, ISBN 1-85984-671-8 , p. 144.
  30. ↑ Sarah Street: Black Narcissus . Tauris, London 2005, ISBN 1-84511-046-3 , p. 13.
  31. ↑ Sarah Street: British National Cinema , pp. 14–15.
  32. ↑ Antonia Lant: Britain at the End of Empire . In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: The Oxford History of World Cinema , p. 370.
  33. ↑ Geoffrey Macnab: J Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry . Routledge, London 1993, ISBN 0-415-07272-7 , p. 216.
  34. ↑ James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film . IB Tauris & Co, London 2005, ISBN 1-85043-807-2 , p9.
  35. ↑ James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film . IB Tauris & Co, London 2005, ISBN 1-85043-807-2 , p. 167.
  36. ↑ Ian MacKillop, Neil Sinyard: British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, ISBN 0-7190-6488-0 , p.2.
  37. ↑ Sue Harper, Vincent Porter: British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN 978-0-19-815934-6 , pp. 255–256.
  38. ↑ James Chapman: Our Finest Hour Revisited: The Second World War revisited in British Feature Films since 1945 . In: Journal of Popular British Cinema , No. 1, 1998, pp. 63–75.
  39. ↑ Jörg Helbig: History of British Film , p. 132.
  40. ↑ Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-1949 . Routledge, London 1992, ISBN 0-415-07684-6 , p. 182.
  41. ↑ Jörg Helbig: History of British Film , p. 140.
  42. ↑ Robert Murphy: Sixties British Cinema . British Film Institute, London 1992, ISBN 0-85170-324-0 , p. 162.
  43. ↑ Derek Hill: The Face of Horror . In: Sight & Sound , Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter 1958–1959, p. 9.
  44. ↑ a b Peter Hutchings: Hammer and beyond: The British Horror Film . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1993, ISBN 0-7190-3719-0 , pp. 88–89.
  45. ↑ William K. Everson: Classics of the Horror Film . Citadel Press, Secaucus 1974, p. 184.
  46. ↑ Lindsay Anderson: Stand Up! stand up . In: Sight & Sound , Autumn 1956, pp. 63–69.
  47. ↑ see Lindsay Anderson 's program notes ( Memento des Originals from September 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. for the re-release of Free Cinema 1 & 2 on August 15, 1977. @1@2Template:Webarchiv/IABot/www.bfi.org.uk
  48. ↑ Anthony Aldgate, Jeffrey Richards: Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present . IB Tauris, London 2002, ISBN 1-86064-288-8 , p. 186.
  49. ↑ Margaret Dickinson, Sarah Street: Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927-1984. BFI Publishing, London 1985, ISBN 0-85170-160-4 , p. 238.
  50. ↑ a b Jonathan Stubbs: The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s . In: Journal of British Cinema and Television . Volume 6, Number 1, May 2009, pp. 1-20.
  51. ↑ James Robert Parish: Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops . John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken 2006, ISBN 978-0-471-69159-4 , p. 25.
  52. ↑ Emanuel Levy, All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards. Continuum International Publishing, London 2003, ISBN 0-8264-1452-4 , p. 95.
  53. ↑ Jeremy Black: The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novel to the Big Screen . University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2005, ISBN 0-8032-6240-X , p. 120.
  54. ↑ a b Jörg Helbig: History of British Film , pp. 184–186.
  55. ↑ Stephen Glynn: A Hard Day's Night . IB Tauris, London 2005, ISBN 1-85043-587-1 , p. 82 ff.
  56. ↑ Andrew Caine, Interpreting rock movies: the pop film and its critics in Britain . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2004, ISBN 0-7190-6538-0 , p. 155.
  57. ↑ Duncan Petrie: British Cinema: The Search for Identity . In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: The Oxford History of World Cinema , p. 608.
  58. ↑ Jim Leach: British Films . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-65276-6 , p. 130.
  59. ↑ Robert Murphy: Sixties British Cinema . British Film Institute, London 1992, ISBN 0-85170-324-0 , p. 143.
  60. ↑ Jeffrey Richards: New waves and old myths: British cinema in the 1960s . In: Bart Moore-Gilbert, John Seed: Cultural revolution?: the challenge of the arts in the 1960s . Routledge, London 1992, ISBN 0-203-38002-9 , p. 180.
  61. ↑ Jane Chapman: Issues in Contemporary Documentary . Polity Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-7456-4009-9 , p. 89.
  62. ↑ Horace Newcomb (ed.): Encyclopedia of Television . Fitzroy Dearborn, New York 2004, ISBN 1-57958-412-8 , pp. 1995.