ABSTRACT
In their introduction to the British Film Institute’s 1983 monograph Gainsborough Melodrama, the editors, Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy, suggested that Gainsborough melodramas had been rendered invisible because of initial critical derision and later neglect by film theorists. ‘We would like to put these films on the map,’ they argued, ‘and to redress the critical imbalance which has made British film culture of the 1940s seem synonymous with Ealing Studios’ (1). Julian Petley included Gainsborough melodramas in his assessment of ‘the lost continent’ of British cinema, which had been systematically overlooked in critical writing still marked by a ‘dominant realist aesthetic’ (98). Ten years later, Pam Cook continues to argue that Gainsborough costume romances have ‘consistently been marginalised, ignored or subsumed into the consensus in discussion of British cinema’ and suggests that the films have been treated as ‘marginal aberrations’ in a dominant realist aesthetic (1996: 5-6). By quoting some authors and avoiding others, Cook seems to me to overstate her case, ignoring a sea-change that has taken place since 1983. While within official British film culture generally there may still be a yearning for British cinema to offer a unified national identity, in feminist film theory and in the teaching of British cinema the emphasis has swung very much the other way. The work of Cook herself, along with that of Aspinall, Harper, Landy and Thumim, has not only put Gainsborough on the map but has come close to constructing a new critical orthodoxy in which Gainsborough women’s films, with their costumes, contradictions and narrative excesses, are deemed (to varying degrees) to be the films of the period that best speak of and to women, who constituted the main audience during and immediately after the Second World War. In this criticism, Ealing operates as the opposite pole, the patriarchally run studio making films committed to realism and social order.
