{"title":"Memories of Home: The Belfast Films of Mark Cousins and Kenneth Branagh","authors":"R. Barton","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0679","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Mark Cousin’s I Am Belfast (2015) and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2022) as autobiographical cinema. While acknowledging the multiple differences between each film, I argue that they also share many common themes and motifs. These include a determination to depict Belfast as a city shaped as much by a down-to-earth working class identified by their sense of community as by its official history of the Troubles. Both celebrate friendships across the religious divide, and both share a utopian sensibility, expressed as much through aesthetics as narrative devices. My argument centres on the imaginative construction of Belfast in both films, while also drawing attention to how devices, such as the inclusion of songs by Van Morrison, open the works up to a wider process of exilic identity construction. I also consider the issue of ‘cultural Protestantism’ as evidenced in Branagh’s film and how cinema’s own history intersects with the personal histories of both film-makers.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42982386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Skip the warts’: Personal Branding and Pornification in The Look of Love","authors":"Matthew Robinson","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0667","url":null,"abstract":"As the owner of the Raymond Revuebar in Soho and as publisher of pornographic magazines, British businessman and property magnate Paul Raymond had a lasting impact on British culture. The Look of Love seeks to assess that impact in its dramatisation of his life. The biopic locates Raymond as an early exponent of ‘personal branding’ via scenes which depict his flair for public relations and his crafting of a public image emphasising wealth and luxury. It also critiques this process, suggesting that his commitment to personal branding leads him to commodify those closest to him, among them his former wife, girlfriend and daughter. Where typically the juxtaposition between the public and private self has been utilised in biopics in order to convey a figure’s personality, The Look of Love exploits actor Steve Coogan’s associations with impersonation to rework this convention: the film suggests that even in supposedly private moments, Raymond was always seeking to impress an audience via his recreations of iconic film characters. But just as Raymond is represented as committed to this branding project, exploiting those around him to consolidate it, the film itself commits to this version of his life at the expense of others: namely, how Raymond’s ventures and activities were critical in what has been called the developing ‘pornification’ of British society. It is telling that the film includes a sequence in which Raymond instructs a prospective female model to ‘skip the warts’ when recounting her life story: there are warts which the film itself leaves unexamined.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44362102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charles Drazin, Making Hollywood Happen: The Story of Film Finances","authors":"Justin Smith","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0672","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69561370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The Billings verdict’: Kine Weekly and the British Box Office, 1936–62","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0668","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the annual surveys of the British box office compiled by chief film reviewer R. H. (‘Josh’) Billings for the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly between 1936 and 1962. Billings's surveys, known as the ‘Book of Form’, came to be accepted as an authoritative guide to the performance of films at the British box office despite the absence of any actual revenue figures. The article considers how the ‘Book of Form’ was compiled and compares it to various archival sources that provide hard evidence of film revenues in Britain. It concludes that, despite some anomalies, the ‘Billings verdict’ provides a broadly accurate overall summary of the ‘winners’ at the British box office over a period of a quarter of a century.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48062939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Benjamin Halligan, Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society","authors":"Barnaby Falck","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0673","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43605857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sarah Godfrey, Masculinity in British Cinema, 1990–2010","authors":"A. Spicer","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0671","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43355279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alma's (Not) Normal: Normalising Working-Class Women in/on BBC TV Comedy","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0665","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the BBC sitcom Alma's Not Normal and its representation of white working-class femininities in/on British TV comedy. After The Royle Family creator Caroline Aherne's death in July 2017, the BBC created a bursary in memory of the comedy star, awarding £5,000 to the successful applicant to develop a pilot comedy script. Though open to people of all backgrounds and genders, the three winners so far have been working-class women – Sophie Willan, Amy Gledhill and Kiri Pritchard-McLean – an important shift from the recent success of female-fronted and female-authored middle-class comedies on the BBC such as Miranda and Fleabag. This article examines the award's first winner: Boltonian Sophie Willan and her series Alma's Not Normal. While Phil Wickham argues that contemporary working-class sitcoms in Britain display the ‘hidden injuries of class’, something that is felt but no longer acknowledged, I contend that Willan exposes class wounds by explicitly referencing and drawing attention to social issues in her TV series. More specifically, I argue that, as a working-class woman in the North West, Willan uses comedy to interrogate the intersections of class and gender. This textual analysis will then be used as a framework to conceptualise the labour of working-class women in British television comedy, mainly because class has been overlooked as a social category in contemporary scholarship on feminism and humour.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42284417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liminality and the End of Empire in The 7th Dawn","authors":"Paul Cornelius, Douglas Rhein","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0669","url":null,"abstract":"This article reassesses the impact of The 7th Dawn, a British adventure drama from 1964 about the Malayan Emergency. Using a contextual methodology, it examines the film as a product of the Cold War and against the background of previous British films made about the Emergency. Key to understanding the film is its representation of Malaya as a liminal space undergoing a transition to independence and a reflection of that political and physical state in the leading protagonist as a liminal individual undergoing a psychological transition. Among the contextual issues addressed are how colonialism during a time of transition to Malayan independence is seen through the film’s imagery, how ethnic differences are portrayed and how individual roles came to stand for political ideologies. Through formal textual analysis, the study of biographies, memoirs and original texts, as well as through references to film history, the article asserts that this hitherto neglected film should be seen as reflective of a turning point in the depiction of colonialism and attitudes towards race and ethnicity in English language feature films about South East Asia.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47918182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music Hall, Revue and Modernity in Victor Saville's Evergreen","authors":"Simon Featherstone","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0666","url":null,"abstract":"Victor Saville's Evergreen (1934) has long been regarded as an innovative British film musical in its aspirations to the idioms and production values of American cinema of the period and in its integration of continental European artistic design. Complementing these features, this article argues, is a less noted but unusually specific engagement with popular British performance practices and their historical contexts. An examination of the film's representation of music hall and revue, both in its narrative and in its diegetic dance and song sequences, suggests their importance for Gaumont-British's attempt to establish Jessie Matthews as a distinctively novel performer in changing contexts of both British and American film production. More broadly, it also complicates the dominant model of the alleged decline of popular theatre in the period as a result of its competitive engagement with cinema, presenting instead a nuanced sense of their interaction in the 1930s that prefigures the importance of domestic performance traditions for a later period of British national cinema.","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42249750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/jbctv.2023.0664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2023.0664","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43079,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Cinema and Television","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135274616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}