ABSTRACT

Film-makers in Britain in the mid-1990s showed a renewed interest in portraying working-class life, projecting images of alienation and crisis amidst landscapes of industrial recession and economic decline. Such films as Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1994), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1995), Twin Town (Kevin Allen, 1996), Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996), The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997) and TwentyFourSeven (Shane Meadows, 1997) are shot in locations where the men of the community traditionally worked in heavy industries such as steel, shipbuilding, mining and industrial manufacture. These films re-imagine the ‘working-classness’ of their characters through their relation to consumption rather than production, purchasing power rather than labour power, evoking memories of an earlier cycle of British films with a similar emphasis on class and regional identity: the New Wave of the 1960s. 1 Contemporary British films reiterate this approach; working-class identity is depicted not as the collective political unity of a group in society but as a site for exploring the personal stagnation, alienation and social marginalisation of their (primarily) white male characters.