British rural landscapes on film is the first book to exclusively deal with cinematic representations of the British countryside. It offers original insights into how rural areas in Britain have been represented on film, from the silent era, through both world wars, and on into the twenty-first century. It balances new scholarly articles with interviews with two key contemporary British filmmakers (Patrick Keiller and Gideon Koppel). The contributors to this book demonstrate that the countryside has provided Britain (and its constituent nations and regions) with a dense range of spaces in which contested cultural identities have been (and continue to be) worked through. The diverse and varied essays in this book draw on a range of popular and alternative films and genres in order to demonstrate how far film representations come to shape - and be shaped by - the material and embodied circumstances of what we might think of as 'lived' rural experience. They also show how representations of British rural landscapes in films often drawn on tropes previously seen in literature and art. This collection focuses primarily on questions of modernity versus tradition, nationhood, and the relationship between the global and the local. It will be of interest to scholars of British cinema history, British film, cultural geography and rural studies in particular, as well as the general reader.
Author(s): Paul Newland
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 220
City: Manchester
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: approaching British rural landscapes on film
The aims of this book
What is landscape?
British rural landscape and film genre
Notes
1 Silent landscapes: rural settings, national identity and British silent cinema
Landscape and national cinema
The early development of British cinema: storytelling versus pictorialism
Hepworth, Newall and Elvey: the emergence of a middlebrow art cinema
Projecting a national landscape: ‘a typically British school of film-.making’
The functions of landscape in British silent cinema
The landscape of invented tradition
Some conclusions
Notes
2 British landscapes in pre-Second World War film publicity
Notes
3 Rural imagery in Second World War British cinema
The rural as idyll
The dark rural
Neo-.Romanticism: Powell and Pressburger
Endthought
Notes
4 ‘An unlimited field for experiment’: Britain’s stereoscopic landscapes
Stereoscopic landscape
Critical response
Conclusion
Notes
5 The figure (and disfigurement) in the landscape: The Go-.Between’s picturesque
Hartley’s geographical psyche: the country estate in print, 1927–53
Losey and the country estate on screen after 1945
Scripting The Go-.Between: time out of place
Adaptation by landscape
History in the landscape: the picturesque
Conclusion
Notes
6 ‘Here is Wales, there England’: contested borders and blurred boundaries in On the Black Hill
Landscape and national identity
The border and imaging the Welsh landscape
Welsh landscape on film
Cynefin and cognitive mapping
The Vision as dwelling place
Physical and psychological borders
The visibility and ambivalence of the English–.Welsh border
Notes
7 Where the land meets the sea: liminality, identity and rural landscape in contemporary Scottish cinema
Introduction
Dreams of fulfilment: Another Time, Another Place
‘Torn between languages’: Blue Black Permanent
Venturing out onto the ice: The Winter Guest
Conclusion: connections beyond the national
Notes
8 Fantasy, fallacy and allusion: reconceptualising British landscapes through the lens of children’s cinema
Notes
9 Picturesque, pastoral and dirty: uncivilised topographies in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Notes
10 Folk horror and the contemporary cult of British rural landscape: the case of Blood on Satan’s Claw
Folk horror
Blood on Satan’s Claw then and now
1970s rural horror(s)
The contemporary cult of the rural
Post-millennial rural horror
Conclusion
Notes
11 sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel
Paul Newland
Gideon Koppel
Paul Newland
Gideon Koppel
Paul Newland
Gideon Koppel
Notes
12 Film and the repossession of rural space: interview with Patrick Keiller
Paul Newland
Patrick Keiller
Paul Newland
Patrick Keiller
Paul Newland
Patrick Keiller
Paul Newland
Patrick Keiller
Notes
Index
