ABSTRACT
In some recent debates, popular historical film has been interpreted either as a passive tool of dominant ideology, or as the site of a repressed proletarian imagination (Elley 1984; Richards 1984; Fraser 1988). Neither of these positions is satisfactory; one is too doctrinaire and the other too sentimental, and both fail to analyse the complexity of the social role of popular cinema. I should like to stress the range of tasks which popular cultural forms fulfil. They have, I think, a fourfold function.
